* * * This is the old edition! The new edition is under the title "Cracking Codes with Python" by Al Sweigart * * *Hacking Secret Ciphers with Python not only teaches you how to write in secret ciphers with paper and pencil. This book teaches you how to write your own cipher programs and also the hacking programs that can break the encrypted messages from these ciphers. Unfortunately, the programs in this book won't get the reader in trouble with the law (or rather, fortunately) but it is a guide on the basics of both cryptography and the Python programming language. Instead of presenting a dull laundry list of concepts, this book provides the source code to several fun programming projects for adults and young adults.
Learn how to program in Python while making and breaking ciphers—algorithms used to create and send secret messages! After a crash course in Python programming basics, you’ll learn to make, test, and hack programs that encrypt text with classical ciphers like the transposition cipher and Vigenère cipher. You’ll begin with simple programs for the reverse and Caesar ciphers and then work your way up to public key cryptography, the type of encryption used to secure today’s online transactions, including digital signatures, email, and Bitcoin. Each program includes the full code and a line-by-line explanation of how things work. By the end of the book, you’ll have learned how to code in Python and you’ll have the clever programs to prove it! You’ll also learn how to: - Combine loops, variables, and flow control statements into real working programs - Use dictionary files to instantly detect whether decrypted messages are valid English or gibberish - Create test programs to make sure that your code encrypts and decrypts correctly - Code (and hack!) a working example of the affine cipher, which uses modular arithmetic to encrypt a message - Break ciphers with techniques such as brute-force and frequency analysis There’s no better way to learn to code than to play with real programs. Cracking Codes with Python makes the learning fun!
Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python will teach you how to make computer games using the popular Python programming language—even if you’ve never programmed before! Begin by building classic games like Hangman, Guess the Number, and Tic-Tac-Toe, and then work your way up to more advanced games, like a text-based treasure hunting game and an animated collision-dodging game with sound effects. Along the way, you’ll learn key programming and math concepts that will help you take your game programming to the next level. Learn how to: –Combine loops, variables, and flow control statements into real working programs –Choose the right data structures for the job, such as lists, dictionaries, and tuples –Add graphics and animation to your games with the pygame module –Handle keyboard and mouse input –Program simple artificial intelligence so you can play against the computer –Use cryptography to convert text messages into secret code –Debug your programs and find common errors As you work through each game, you’ll build a solid foundation in Python and an understanding of computer science fundamentals. What new game will you create with the power of Python? The projects in this book are compatible with Python 3.
Develop a greater intuition for the proper use of cryptography. This book teaches the basics of writing cryptographic algorithms in Python, demystifies cryptographic internals, and demonstrates common ways cryptography is used incorrectly. Cryptography is the lifeblood of the digital world’s security infrastructure. From governments around the world to the average consumer, most communications are protected in some form or another by cryptography. These days, even Google searches are encrypted. Despite its ubiquity, cryptography is easy to misconfigure, misuse, and misunderstand. Developers building cryptographic operations into their applications are not typically experts in the subject, and may not fully grasp the implication of different algorithms, modes, and other parameters. The concepts in this book are largely taught by example, including incorrect uses of cryptography and how "bad" cryptography can be broken. By digging into the guts of cryptography, you can experience what works, what doesn't, and why. What You’ll Learn Understand where cryptography is used, why, and how it gets misused Know what secure hashing is used for and its basic propertiesGet up to speed on algorithms and modes for block ciphers such as AES, and see how bad configurations breakUse message integrity and/or digital signatures to protect messagesUtilize modern symmetric ciphers such as AES-GCM and CHACHAPractice the basics of public key cryptography, including ECDSA signaturesDiscover how RSA encryption can be broken if insecure padding is usedEmploy TLS connections for secure communicationsFind out how certificates work and modern improvements such as certificate pinning and certificate transparency (CT) logs Who This Book Is For IT administrators and software developers familiar with Python. Although readers may have some knowledge of cryptography, the book assumes that the reader is starting from scratch.
Best-selling author Al Sweigart shows you how to easily build over 80 fun programs with minimal code and maximum creativity. If you’ve mastered basic Python syntax and you’re ready to start writing programs, you’ll find The Big Book of Small Python Projects both enlightening and fun. This collection of 81 Python projects will have you making digital art, games, animations, counting pro- grams, and more right away. Once you see how the code works, you’ll practice re-creating the programs and experiment by adding your own custom touches. These simple, text-based programs are 256 lines of code or less. And whether it’s a vintage screensaver, a snail-racing game, a clickbait headline generator, or animated strands of DNA, each project is designed to be self-contained so you can easily share it online. You’ll create: • Hangman, Blackjack, and other games to play against your friends or the computer • Simulations of a forest fire, a million dice rolls, and a Japanese abacus • Animations like a virtual fish tank, a rotating cube, and a bouncing DVD logo screensaver • A first-person 3D maze game • Encryption programs that use ciphers like ROT13 and Vigenère to conceal text If you’re tired of standard step-by-step tutorials, you’ll love the learn-by-doing approach of The Big Book of Small Python Projects. It’s proof that good things come in small programs!
Presents a twenty-one-day, three-step training program to achieve healthier thought patterns for a better quality of life by using the repetitive steps of analyzing, imagining, and reprogramming to help break down the barriers, including negative thought loops and mental roadblocks.
This text introduces the spirit and theory of hacking as well as the science behind it all; it also provides some core techniques and tricks of hacking so you can think like a hacker, write your own hacks or thwart potential system attacks.
A hands-on guide to hacking computer systems from the ground up, from capturing traffic to crafting sneaky, successful trojans. A crash course in modern hacking techniques, Ethical Hacking is already being used to prepare the next generation of offensive security experts. In its many hands-on labs, you’ll explore crucial skills for any aspiring penetration tester, security researcher, or malware analyst. You’ll begin with the basics: capturing a victim’s network traffic with an ARP spoofing attack and then viewing it in Wireshark. From there, you’ll deploy reverse shells that let you remotely run commands on a victim’s computer, encrypt files by writing your own ransomware in Python, and fake emails like the ones used in phishing attacks. In advanced chapters, you’ll learn how to fuzz for new vulnerabilities, craft trojans and rootkits, exploit websites with SQL injection, and escalate your privileges to extract credentials, which you’ll use to traverse a private network. You’ll work with a wide range of professional penetration testing tools—and learn to write your own tools in Python—as you practice tasks like: • Deploying the Metasploit framework’s reverse shells and embedding them in innocent-seeming files • Capturing passwords in a corporate Windows network using Mimikatz • Scanning (almost) every device on the internet to find potential victims • Installing Linux rootkits that modify a victim’s operating system • Performing advanced Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks that execute sophisticated JavaScript payloads Along the way, you’ll gain a foundation in the relevant computing technologies. Discover how advanced fuzzers work behind the scenes, learn how internet traffic gets encrypted, explore the inner mechanisms of nation-state malware like Drovorub, and much more. Developed with feedback from cybersecurity students, Ethical Hacking addresses contemporary issues in the field not often covered in other books and will prepare you for a career in penetration testing. Most importantly, you’ll be able to think like an ethical hacker: someone who can carefully analyze systems and creatively gain access to them.
This book is a practical guide to discovering and exploiting security flaws in web applications. The authors explain each category of vulnerability using real-world examples, screen shots and code extracts. The book is extremely practical in focus, and describes in detail the steps involved in detecting and exploiting each kind of security weakness found within a variety of applications such as online banking, e-commerce and other web applications. The topics covered include bypassing login mechanisms, injecting code, exploiting logic flaws and compromising other users. Because every web application is different, attacking them entails bringing to bear various general principles, techniques and experience in an imaginative way. The most successful hackers go beyond this, and find ways to automate their bespoke attacks. This handbook describes a proven methodology that combines the virtues of human intelligence and computerized brute force, often with devastating results. The authors are professional penetration testers who have been involved in web application security for nearly a decade. They have presented training courses at the Black Hat security conferences throughout the world. Under the alias "PortSwigger", Dafydd developed the popular Burp Suite of web application hack tools.
Like the best-selling Black Hat Python, Black Hat Go explores the darker side of the popular Go programming language. This collection of short scripts will help you test your systems, build and automate tools to fit your needs, and improve your offensive security skillset. Black Hat Go explores the darker side of Go, the popular programming language revered by hackers for its simplicity, efficiency, and reliability. It provides an arsenal of practical tactics from the perspective of security practitioners and hackers to help you test your systems, build and automate tools to fit your needs, and improve your offensive security skillset, all using the power of Go. You'll begin your journey with a basic overview of Go's syntax and philosophy and then start to explore examples that you can leverage for tool development, including common network protocols like HTTP, DNS, and SMB. You'll then dig into various tactics and problems that penetration testers encounter, addressing things like data pilfering, packet sniffing, and exploit development. You'll create dynamic, pluggable tools before diving into cryptography, attacking Microsoft Windows, and implementing steganography. You'll learn how to: Make performant tools that can be used for your own security projects Create usable tools that interact with remote APIs Scrape arbitrary HTML data Use Go's standard package, net/http, for building HTTP servers Write your own DNS server and proxy Use DNS tunneling to establish a C2 channel out of a restrictive network Create a vulnerability fuzzer to discover an application's security weaknesses Use plug-ins and extensions to future-proof productsBuild an RC2 symmetric-key brute-forcer Implant data within a Portable Network Graphics (PNG) image. Are you ready to add to your arsenal of security tools? Then let's Go!
