Sniff process communication

Question

On Windows 7, I have two local processes which communicate to let the other execute commands. And I want to know what they are talking.

After some first investigation, it's not over Sockets or Loopback, but seems like they are using (named-)pipes (at least both have opened a few of them, can't say if they are the same)

How can i sniff all that communication between these processes?

Answer 1

Wireshark can sniff named pipes, as described in this article :

Before pipes, Wireshark could read the captured packets to display either from a file (which had been previously created) or for a network interface (in real time). Since pipes are supported, Wireshark can also read packets from another application, and shows them in real time.

There are some limitations that you should be aware of:

1. This only works with the de facto standard libpcap format version 2.4, as described in Development/LibpcapFileFormat. Some other formats may work in theory, but this has not been tested.
2. Capturing from a pipe is inconvenient, because you have to set up the pipe and put a file header into the pipe before you can start the capture. A few patches have been mailed to the development list that could solve this, so if you find the approach inconvenient, try the patches.
3. The named pipe is not listed in the drop-down interface selection, and must be typed into the interface box. On Windows, it must be typed slowly (or pasted).

After trying it out, or finding out which are the mentioned patches, or getting in touch with the author of the above article, there is still left the problem of knowing the name of the pipe, which is miraculously solved (again) by the sysinternals utility PipeList :

What you might also find surprising is that it's possible to obtain a directory listing of the named pipes defined on a system. This fact is not documented, nor is it possible to do this using the Win32 API.

Another solution might be the commercial product I/O Ninja ($30, trial available).