- It is useful for debugging multi-process applications and gaining transparency into how they communicate with one another in their IT environment
- Modern applications have distinct processes that plug into one another in a black box, creating significant challenges for developers when something breaks
Guardicore has , announced the availability of IPCDump, a new open source tool for tracing interprocess communication on Linux. It said that the tool covers most interprocess communication (IPC) mechanisms, including pipes, fifos, signals, Unix sockets, loopback-based networking, and pseudoterminals. It is useful for debugging multi-process applications and gaining transparency into how they communicate with one another in their IT environment.
Guardicore VP of Research Ofri Ziv said, “IPCDump is the natural byproduct of our talented R&D team’s efforts to push the technical boundaries of our segmentation platform. Rather than let it go to waste, our team wanted to show our commitment to the development and security communities by sharing a useful open source debugging tool.”
How business apps communicate with internal and external systems
Modern applications have distinct processes that plug into one another in a black box, creating significant challenges for developers when something breaks. This issue is particularly true for debugging complex multiprocess applications. IPCDump solves this problem by tracing both the metadata and contents of apps’ communication and tracing IPC between short-lived processes.
Security practitioners can also use the open source tool to explore how business apps communicate with internal and external systems. It said that IPCDump can also easily track short-lived processes’ creation and destruction, a tedious task that typically requires security and IT teams to check port numbers against netstat manually. It comes with support for pipes and FIFOs, Signals (regular and real-time),Unix streams and datagrams and Pseudoterminal-based IPC. It also comes with Event filtering based on process PID or name and Human-friendly or JSON-formatted output.