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

Implementing JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) in Python

A JSON Web Token is an access token standardized in RFC 7519 that enables secure data exchange between two parties. This token contains all the important information about an entity, which means that there is no need to query a database or save the session on the server. A JSON Web Token offers several advantages over the traditional cookie authentication and authorization method, so it is used in the following situations:

  • REST applications: In REST applications, the JWT guarantees statelessness by sending the authentication data directly with the request.
  • Cross-origin resource sharing: The JWT sends information using cross-origin resource sharing, which gives it a great advantage over cookies, which are not usually sent using this procedure.
  • Use of many frameworks: When multiple frameworks are used, authentication data can be shared more easily.

How does a JSON Web Token work?

The user login exemplifies...