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

Packet-sniffing with scapy

One of the features offered by scapy is to sniff the network packets passing through an interface. Let’s create a simple Python script to sniff traffic on your local machine network interface. Scapy provides a method to sniff packets and dissect their contents:

>>> sniff(filter="",iface="any",prn=function,count=N)

With the sniff function, we can capture packets in the same way that tools such as tcpdump or Wireshark do, indicating the network interface from which we want to collect the generated traffic and a counter that indicates the number of packets we want to capture:

>>> packets = sniff (iface = "wlo1", count = 3)

Now we are going to see each parameter of the sniff function in detail. The arguments for the sniff() method are as follows:

>>> help(sniff)
Help on function sniff in module scapy.sendrecv:
sniff(*args, **kwargs)
    Sniff packets and return a list of packets...