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

Building an HTTP client with requests

Being able to interact with RESTful APIs based on HTTP is an increasingly common task in projects in any programming language. In Python, we also have the option of interacting with a REST API in a simple way with the requests module. In this section, we will review the different ways in which we can interact with an HTTP-based API using the Python requests package.

One of the best options within the Python ecosystem for making HTTP requests is the requests module. You can install the requests library in your system in a straightforward manner with the pip command:

$ pip install requests

To test the library in our script, just import it as we do with other modules. Basically, requests is a wrapper of urllib.request, along with other Python modules, to provide the REST structure with simple methods, so we have the get, post, put, update, delete, head, and options methods, which are all the requisite methods for interacting with a RESTful...