Book Image

Python for Security and Networking - Third Edition

By : José Ortega
4 (3)
Book Image

Python for Security and Networking - Third Edition

4 (3)
By: José Ortega

Overview of this book

Python’s latest updates add numerous libraries that can be used to perform critical security-related missions, including detecting vulnerabilities in web applications, taking care of attacks, and helping to build secure and robust networks that are resilient to them. This fully updated third edition will show you how to make the most of them and improve your security posture. The first part of this book will walk you through Python scripts and libraries that you’ll use throughout the book. Next, you’ll dive deep into the core networking tasks where you will learn how to check a network’s vulnerability using Python security scripting and understand how to check for vulnerabilities in your network – including tasks related to packet sniffing. You’ll also learn how to achieve endpoint protection by leveraging Python packages along with writing forensics scripts. The next part of the book will show you a variety of modern techniques, libraries, and frameworks from the Python ecosystem that will help you extract data from servers and analyze the security in web applications. You’ll take your first steps in extracting data from a domain using OSINT tools and using Python tools to perform forensics tasks. By the end of this book, you will be able to make the most of Python to test the security of your network and applications.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Section 1: Python Environment and System Programming Tools
4
Section 2: Network Scripting and Packet Sniffing with Python
8
Section 3: Server Scripting and Port Scanning with Python
12
Section 4: Server Vulnerabilities and Security in Web Applications
16
Section 5: Python Forensics
20
Assessments – Answers to the End-of-Chapter Questions
21
Other Books You May Enjoy
22
Index

Encrypting and decrypting information with cryptography

In this section, we will review the cryptography module for encrypting and decrypting data, with algorithms such as AES.

Introduction to the cryptography module

The cryptography (https://pypi.org/project/cryptography) Python module is available in the PyPI repository. Use pip to install it:

$ pip install cryptography

The main advantage that cryptography provides over other cryptography modules such as pycryptodome is that it offers superior performance when it comes to performing cryptographic operations.

This module includes both high-level and low-level interfaces for common cryptographic algorithms, such as symmetric ciphers, message digests, and key-derivation functions. For example, we can use symmetric encryption with the fernet package.

Symmetric encryption with the fernet package

cryptography is a Python package that can be used to achieve symmetric key encryption. Symmetric key encryption...