Research and Development

SDL

Inter Process Communication (IPC) is an ubiquitous part of modern computing. Processes often talk to each other and many software packages contain multiple components which need to exchange data to run properly. Named pipes are one of the many forms of IPC in use today and are extensively used on the Windows platform as a means to exchange data between running processes in a semi-persistent manner. Continue reading

Today I was looking at how plugins could safely be incorporated into a J2EE application server. The plugins in this instance are executed server side, rather than on the client and are, in the main, provided by 3rd parties (digital advertising agencies etc). The aim was to limit the scope in which they operate. The implementation I looked at is pretty much the first instance where I’ve seen these techniques used, so I thought it was worth sharing. Continue reading

We recently announced our sponsorship of EMF Camp 2014, were ready to go Portcullis flags in tow and will be heading on over to Milton Keynes to help get EMF ready.

While there we will not only be sponsoring the Lounge where people can come and enjoy a space to relax and drink beer and setting up Portcullis Village where people can visit us and exchange ideas but we will be having members of Portcullis hosting talks throughout the weekend. Continue reading

Windows system objects are one of the interesting areas of binary application assessments that are often ignored or misunderstood. Many people don’t realise that abstract Windows application programming concepts such as mutexes, events, semaphores, shared memory sections, and jobs all come together under the purview of the Windows Object Manager. These objects, like those in the filesystem and registry namespaces, have all sorts of interesting security impacts when not properly managed. Continue reading

The previous post about session management was about how to improve the security of web sessions. An aspect which was not addressed in that post is how to identify that a session is not in active use any more but where the user has manually logged out. For example, a user who was using a banking application and closed the tab without logging out the application. Continue reading