Python is a popular choice among security professionals and ethical hackers due to its versatility and extensive library of libraries that may be utilized to aid in ethical hacking.
Ethical hacking, also known as penetration testing, is the technique of breaking into computers and devices lawfully in order to assess the security of computer programs, networks, and data.
As a hacker, you may easily create your own ethical hacking tools to automate certain task using python.
Furthermore, hackers and cybersecurity professionals utilize Python scripts to analyze malware and uncover vulnerabilities, though some use Python to develop exploit programs.
In this thread, we will look at the top 17 Python libraries for ethical hacking or penetration testing.
Scapy
Scapy is a complete interactive packet manipulation tool written in Python by Philippe Biondi. The tool is used to manipulate network packets, which aids in network discovery, probing, tracing, routing, and scanning.
It is a strong interactive packet manipulation tool and library written in Python
Requests
The requests library is a fantastically useful and adaptable tool for developing Python programs that interface with online services.
This module makes HTTP requests more user-friendly by including intuitive features like automated content decompression and decoding, connection timeouts, authentication, and so on.
Beautiful Soup 4
Beautiful Soup is a Python package for parsing HTML and XML documents. It creates a parse tree for parsed pages that can be used to extract data from HTML, which is useful for web scraping.
Socket
The socket module defines how server and client machines can communicate at hardware level using socket endpoints on top of the operating system. The ‘socket’ API supports both connection-oriented and connection less network protocols.
pwntools
pwntools is a Python-based CTF (Capture-the-Flag) framework and exploit development package. It is intended to aid in rapid prototyping and development.
pwntools includes a variety of useful tools for penetration testing, reversing engineering automation, developing exploits, fuzzing programs, and more.
pwntools allows users to quickly design exploits for CTF challenges.
IMpacket
Used for interacting with network protocols. Currently, the library focuses on supporting low-level socket programming, TCP/IP, and a variety of higher-level protocols. It’s a Python package that allows programmers to easily construct and decode network packets.
Many hackers and penetration testers utilize Impacket to create unique network-based intrusion attacks such as man in the middle and session hijacking. It was created as an internal testing tool but has evolved into a strong hacker’s tool that may be used against networks.
Paramiko
Paramiko is a Python library that makes a connection with a remote device through SSh. Paramiko is using SSH2 as a replacement for SSL to make a secure connection between two devices. It also supports the SFTP client and server model.
Pexpect
A Python module for automatically spawning and controlling child apps. Pexpect can be used to automate interactive programs like ssh, ftp, passwd, telnet, and so on. It can be used to automate setup scripts for installing software packages on multiple servers.
Selenium
Selenium is a powerful tool for controlling web browsers through programs and performing browser automation. It is functional for all browsers and works on all major OS.
Faker
Faker is a Python package that creates fictitious data. It can generate anything from fake texts, bibliography entries, XML documents, and so on. Faker is extremely simple to use.
Simply call 'faker.name()' to get a random name, and 'faker.address()' to get a fake address. It includes a plethora of other functions for creating bogus data. There are a number of reasons why you might want to use Faker.
Perhaps you need to populate a database with fictitious data for a prototype, or you want to remain anonymous online by using fictitious credentials or addresses.
pylibnet
Pylibnet is a python module for the libnet packet injection library. It provides a python API for libnet, and provides functionality for sending packets, sniffing frames, and displaying libpcap traces.
RawSocketPy
Raw socket is a layer 2 python library for communication using the MAC addresses only. This library allows you to implement a custom layer 2 communication using raw sockets in Python, synchronous and asynchronous.
Twisted
Twisted is an event-driven networking engine written in Python. It provides an abstraction of the TCP protocol that makes it easy to write network clients and servers.
It is particularly notable for its broad support of SSL, IPv6, and a large number of protocols including the following: HTTP, IRC, NNTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, SSHv2, and DNS. Twisted supports both synchronous and asynchronous networking paradigm.
Pymetasploit3
Pymetasploit3 is a full-fledged Python3 Metasploit automation library. It can interact with Metasploit either through msfrpcd or the msgrpc plugin in msfconsole.
Cryptography
Cryptography is a Python package that provides cryptographic recipes and primitives. Encryption, hashing, random number generation, signatures, and ciphers for block and stream ciphers are all included.
It provides a higher-level API to cryptographically strong algorithms such as digital signatures, as well as low-level cryptographic building blocks optimized for performance.
This functionality is used in ethical hacking to encrypt and decrypt sensitive information shared on the internet. In general, cryptography serves as the foundation of a secure internet.
python-nmap
is a python library that helps in using Nmap port scanner. Nmap is a network administration and security auditing tool. It is typically used to discover hosts and services available on a network, although it can also be used to examine a single host.
The python-nmap library serves as a python wrapper for the Nmap tool allowing you to easily access, use and manipulate the features and functionality of Nmap in python. The library does not replace the Nmap tool but only provides an interface to interact with Nmap.
It offers a rich set of features for port scanning, host discovery, and TCP/IP fingerprinting. This library is a perfect tool for hackers and systems administrators who want to automate network scanning tasks and reports. It also supports nmap script outputs.
Mechanize
The mechanize module in Python is similar to perl WWW:Mechanize.
It gives you a browser like object to interact with web pages.