Mastering Python for Networking and Security Second Edition

<Mastering Python for Networking and Security Second Edition> Tackle security and networking issues using Python libraries such as Nmap, requests, asyncio, and scapy

▶Book Description
It's now more apparent than ever that security is a critical aspect of IT infrastructure, and that devastating data breaches can occur from simple network line hacks. As shown in this book, combining the latest version of Python with an increased focus on network security can help you to level up your defenses against cyber attacks and cyber threats.

Python is being used for increasingly advanced tasks, with the latest update introducing new libraries and packages featured in the Python 3.7.4 recommended version. Moreover, most scripts are compatible with the latest versions of Python and can also be executed in a virtual environment.

This book will guide you through using these updated packages to build a secure network with the help of Python scripting. You'll cover a range of topics, from building a network to the procedures you need to follow to secure it. Starting by exploring different packages and libraries, you'll learn about various ways to build a network and connect with the Tor network through Python scripting. You will also learn how to assess a network's vulnerabilities using Python security scripting. Later, you'll learn how to achieve endpoint protection by leveraging Python packages, along with writing forensic scripts.

By the end of this Python book, you'll be able to use Python to build secure apps using cryptography and steganography techniques.

▶What You Will Learn
-Create scripts in Python to automate security and pentesting tasks
-Explore Python programming tools that are used in network security processes
-Automate tasks such as analyzing and extracting information from servers
-Understand how to detect server vulnerabilities and analyze security modules
-Discover ways to connect to and get information from the Tor network
-Focus on how to extract information with Python forensics tools

▶Key Features
-Enhance your Python programming skills in securing systems and executing networking tasks
-Explore Python scripts to debug and secure complex networks
-Learn to avoid common cyber events with modern Python scripting

▶Who This Book Is For
This Python network security book is for network engineers, system administrators, or any security professional looking to overcome networking and security challenges. You will also find this book useful if you're a programmer with prior experience in Python. A basic understanding of general programming structures and the Python programming language is required before getting started.

▶What this book covers
- Chapter 1, Working with Python Scripting, introduces you to the Python language, object-oriented programming, data structures, exceptions, managing dependencies for developing with Python, and development environments.

- Chapter 2, System Programming Packages, teaches you about the main Python modules for system programming, looking at topics including reading and writing files, threads, sockets, multithreading, and concurrency.

- Chapter 3, Socket Programming, provides you with some basics of Python networking using the socket module. This module exposes all of the necessary pieces to quickly write TCP and UDP clients, as well as servers for writing low-level network applications.

- Chapter 4, HTTP Programming, covers the HTTP protocol and the main Python modules, such as the urllib standard library, and the requests and httpx modules to retrieve and manipulate web content. We also cover HTTP authentication mechanisms and how we can manage them with the requests module.

- Chapter 5, Connecting to the Tor Network and Discovering Hidden Services, explains how Tor can assist us in the research and development of tools from an anonymity and privacy point of view. In addition, we will review how to extract information from hidden services using Python modules.

- Chapter 6, Gathering Information from Servers, explores the modules that allow the extraction of information that servers are exposing publicly, such as Shodan and Binary Edge. We will also look at getting server banners and information on DNS servers and introduce you to fuzzy processing using the pywebfuzz module.

- Chapter 7, Interacting with FTP, SFTP, and SSH Servers, details the Python modules that allow us to interact with FTP, SFTP, and SSH servers, checking the security in SSH servers with the ssh-audit tool. Also, we will learn how to implement SSH clients and servers with the asyncSSH and asyncio modules.

- Chapter 8, Working with Nmap Scanner, introduces Nmap as a port scanner and covers how to implement network scanning with Python and Nmap to gather information on a network, a specific host, and the services that are running on that host. Also, we cover how to find possible vulnerabilities in a given network with Nmap scripts.

- Chapter 9, Interacting with Vulnerability Scanner, gets into Nessus and OpenVAS as vulnerability scanners and gives you reporting tools for the main vulnerabilities that can be found in servers and web applications with them. Also, we cover how to use them programmatically from Python, with the nessrest and Python-gmv modules.

- Chapter 10, Identifying Server Vulnerabilities in Web Applications, covers the main vulnerabilities in web applications with OWASP methodology and the tools we can find in the Python ecosystem for vulnerability scanning in CMS and web applications, such as sqlmap. We will also cover testing openSSL/TLS vulnerabilities in servers with the sslyze module.

- Chapter 11, Security and Vulnerabilities in Python Modules, covers security and vulnerabilities in Python modules. Also, we cover the review of Python tools such as Bandit as a static code analyzer for detecting vulnerabilities and Python best practices from a security perspective.

- Chapter 12, Python Tools for Forensics Analysis, covers the main tools we have in Python for extracting information from memory, sqlite databases, research about network forensics with PcapXray, getting information from the Windows registry, and using the logging module to register errors and debug Python scripts.

- Chapter 13, Extracting Geolocation and Metadata from Documents, Images, and Browsers, explores the main modules we have in Python for extracting information about geolocation and metadata from images and documents, identifying web technologies, and extracting metadata from Chrome and Firefox browsers.

- Chapter 14, Cryptography and Steganography, covers the main modules we have in Python for encrypting and decrypting information, such as pycryptodome and cryptography. Also, we cover steganography techniques and how to hide information in images with stepic modules. Finally, we will cover Python modules for generating keys securely with the secrets and hashlib modules.