Keeping in line with our previous post “How to prevent users from killing your service or process” and continuing down the road of securing our service this post looks at the prevention of debugging. There are a lot of anti-debugging posts out there, most of them written in C++ and assembly and are therefor of [...]
Nov 192011
Before I say another word, I have read “The arms race between programs and users” and wholeheartedly agree. You can not, and should not, attempt to stop an Administrator from killing your process or stopping your service. That is not what we are trying to do here, we are trying to prevent Joe User from [...]
Aug 212011
Background: I get a lot of traffic looking for details on running a process and collecting the process output. If you haven’t already done so, you should read “How to use System.Diagnostics.Process correctly“. It outlines the major pitfalls of using this class. Another post on “Using the ProcessRunner class” will demonstrate using the helper class [...]
Most people believe escaping arguments to a process is easy. Surround it with quotes, right? Nope. Escape the quotes and surround it with quotes? Nope. Escape the quotes and backslashes and then surround it with quotes? Nope. It’s actually a lot more strange than that. When do you need to escape and quote an argument? [...]
I’d love it if there was a nice clean way to do this; however, there isn’t. When running a process via the Process.Start(…) call one must provide a fully qualified path to an executable. The problem is that hard-coding the full path to the exe isn’t always the best option. This is why there is [...]
I’ve seen many a question on stackoverflow and other places about running a process and capturing it’s output. Using the System.Diagnostics.Process correctly is not easy and most often it’s done wrong. Some common mistakes with System.Diagnostics.Process: Not capturing both output streams (error & output) Not redirecting input can cause applications to hang Not closing redirected [...]
Oct 072009
Let’s face it, using the System.Diagnostics.Process to run a process and capture the output is not as easy as it should be. People often get it wrong without realizing it. Adding to the complexities can be reading both the standard output as well as the standard error stream. To put this to bed once and [...]