Book Image

Python for Security and Networking - Third Edition

By : José Ortega
4 (2)
Book Image

Python for Security and Networking - Third Edition

4 (2)
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

Generating keys securely with the secrets and hashlib modules

In this section, we are going to review the main modules Python provides for generating keys and passwords in a secure way.

Generating keys securely with the secrets module

The secrets module is used to generate cryptographically strong random numbers, suitable for managing data such as passwords, user authentication, security tokens, and related secrets.

In general, the use of random numbers is common in various scientific computing applications and cryptographic applications. With the help of the secrets module, we can generate reliable random data that can be used by cryptographic operations.

The secrets module derives its implementation from the os.urandom() and SystemRandom() methods, which interact with the operating system to ensure cryptographic randomness and can help you accomplish the following tasks:

  • Generate random tokens for security applications.
  • Create strong passwords.
  • ...