Cryptography has a long and important history in protecting critical systems and sensitive information. This book will show you how to encrypt, evaluate, compare, and attack data using Python. Overall, the book will help you deal with the common errors in encryption and show you how to exploit them.
This book is intended for security professionals who want to learn how to encrypt data, evaluate and compare encryption methods, and how to attack them.
Chapter 1, Obfuscation, covers the Caesar cipher and ROT13, simple character substitution ciphers, and base64 encoding. We then move on to XOR. In the end, there are challenges to test your learning that involve cracking the Caesar cipher, reversing base64 encoding, and deciphering XOR encryption without the key.
Chapter 2, Hashing, covers the older MD5 and the newer SHA hashing techniques and also Windows password hashes. The weakest type of hashing is common use, followed by Linux password hashes, which are the strongest type of hashing in common use. Afterward, there are some challenges to complete. The first is to crack some Windows hashes and recover passwords, then you will be tasked with cracking hashes where you don't even know how many rounds of hashing algorithm were used, and finally you will be asked to crack those strong Linux hashes.
Chapter 3, Strong Encryption, covers the primary mode used to hide data today. It is strong enough for the US military. Then, there are two of its modes, ECB and CBC; CBC being the stronger and more common one. We will also discuss the padding oracle attack, which makes it possible to overcome some parts of AES CBC if the designer makes an error and the overly informative error message gives information to the attacker. Finally, we introduce RSA, the main public key algorithm used today, which makes it possible to send secrets over an insecure channel without having exchanged a gives private key. Following all that, we will perform a challenge where, we will crack RSA in the case where it is erroneously created with two similar prime numbers instead of two random prime numbers.
You do not need to have programming experience or any special computer. Any computer that can run Python can do these projects, and you don't need much math because we'll not be inventing new encryption techniques just to learn how to use the pre-existing standard ones that don't require anything more than very basic algebra.
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The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Hands-On-Cryptography-with-Python. In case there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository.
We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!
We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/HandsOnCryptographywithPython_ColorImages.pdf.
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "If we enter HELLO, it prints out the correct answer of KHOOR."
A block of code is set as follows:
alpha = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"
str_in = raw_input("Enter message, like HELLO: ")
n = len(str_in)
str_out = ""
for i in range(n):
c = str_in[i]
loc = alpha.find(c)
print i, c, loc,
newloc = loc + 3
str_out += alpha[newloc]
print newloc, str_out
print "Obfuscated version:", str_outAny command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ pythonBold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Select System info from the Administration panel."
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