* * * 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.

Cryptography, in particular public-key cryptography, has emerged in the last 20 years as an important discipline that is not only the subject of an enormous amount of research, but provides the foundation for information security in many applications. Standards are emerging to meet the demands for cryptographic protection in most areas of data communications. Public-key cryptographic techniques are now in widespread use, especially in the financial services industry, in the public sector, and by individuals for their personal privacy, such as in electronic mail. This Handbook will serve as a valuable reference for the novice as well as for the expert who needs a wider scope of coverage within the area of cryptography. It is a necessary and timely guide for professionals who practice the art of cryptography. The Handbook of Applied Cryptography provides a treatment that is multifunctional: It serves as an introduction to the more practical aspects of both conventional and public-key cryptography It is a valuable source of the latest techniques and algorithms for the serious practitioner It provides an integrated treatment of the field, while still presenting each major topic as a self-contained unit It provides a mathematical treatment to accompany practical discussions It contains enough abstraction to be a valuable reference for theoreticians while containing enough detail to actually allow implementation of the algorithms discussed Now in its third printing, this is the definitive cryptography reference that the novice as well as experienced developers, designers, researchers, engineers, computer scientists, and mathematicians alike will use.

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.

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!

From the world's most renowned security technologist, Bruce Schneier, this 20th Anniversary Edition is the most definitive reference on cryptography ever published and is the seminal work on cryptography. Cryptographic techniques have applications far beyond the obvious uses of encoding and decoding information. For developers who need to know about capabilities, such as digital signatures, that depend on cryptographic techniques, there's no better overview than Applied Cryptography, the definitive book on the subject. Bruce Schneier covers general classes of cryptographic protocols and then specific techniques, detailing the inner workings of real-world cryptographic algorithms including the Data Encryption Standard and RSA public-key cryptosystems. The book includes source-code listings and extensive advice on the practical aspects of cryptography implementation, such as the importance of generating truly random numbers and of keeping keys secure. ". . .the best introduction to cryptography I've ever seen. . . .The book the National Security Agency wanted never to be published. . . ." -Wired Magazine ". . .monumental . . . fascinating . . . comprehensive . . . the definitive work on cryptography for computer programmers . . ." -Dr. Dobb's Journal ". . .easily ranks as one of the most authoritative in its field." -PC Magazine The book details how programmers and electronic communications professionals can use cryptography-the technique of enciphering and deciphering messages-to maintain the privacy of computer data. It describes dozens of cryptography algorithms, gives practical advice on how to implement them into cryptographic software, and shows how they can be used to solve security problems. The book shows programmers who design computer applications, networks, and storage systems how they can build security into their software and systems. With a new Introduction by the author, this premium edition will be a keepsake for all those committed to computer and cyber security.