In the wake of big security attacks and breaches, security/penetration testing is gaining momentum in the quality field. As a popular language in the programming area, it is evident from the tools, books, and scripts published in the last couple of years that Python has become the favorite scripting language for security researchers and hackers.
Why Python is a great option for security scripting
Getting ready
Even though network and application security is inundated with many tools for automated and semi-automated tests, it may not always guarantee success. Improvisation of tools and scripts is the key to pen-testing, and there will always be some tasks that demand to be automated or to be fulfilled in another way. Becoming a successful real-world penetration tester involves a lot of custom scripting and programming tasks.
How to do it...
These are the main reasons for Python's popularity in security scripting and programming.
Python can be used in both and interpreted and compiled forms
Python programs can be compiled in any situation where they can be used as compiled and not required frequent changes. This will make Python programs run much faster and provide a better opportunity to remove vulnerabilities and bugs. Also, interpreted programs run much slower than compiled programs, and are more prone to vulnerabilities and attacks.
Python code uses no compiler and can run on just about any device that runs the Python shell. Also, it shares a couple of other resemblances to scripting languages over programming languages. So, Python can be used to perform the functions of a scripting language.
Syntax and indented layout
The syntax and indented layout of Python makes it easy to figure out what is happening in a program during the review. The indentation also makes the program more readable and helps make the collaborative programming easier.
Simple learning curve
Learning a new programming language is always a rigorous task. But Python was designed in such a way that it should be easily learned by even a novice programmer. Python's growing acceptance with the programmers is mainly due to its easiness to learn and its design philosophy highlights code readability that will help the beginner developers to learn many things by reading the code itself. Also, Python's read evaluate print loop (REPL) provides the developer a chance to play around with code and experiment with it. The standard Python library maintains a lot of functionalities with which we can execute complex functionalities with ease.
Powerful third-party libraries
Once you have learned Python, you can leverage the platform backed with a large number of libraries. The Python Package Index (PyPI), is a repository of more than 85,000 reusable Python modules and scripts that you can use in your scripts. Python is the best language to learn as a security researcher, because of the availability of its large number of reverse engineering and exploitation libraries.
Cross-platform (code anywhere)
Python works on Linux, Microsoft Windows, macOS X, and many other operating systems and devices. A Python program written on a macOS X computer will run on a Linux system and vice versa. Also, Python programs can run on Microsoft Windows computers, as long as the machine has Python interpreter installed.
