Comments by Shubhanshu Pathak

Shubhanshu Pathak 31-Jan-16 22:25pm View

Hi Kornfeld,
Thank you so much for the response.

So what I understood from the discussion is:
1. 'Opening a port' is not a security risk if the underlying service is good
enough to handle the security breaches.
2. If the services doesn't provide any edit functionality to the user/hacker
than it is safe enough.
3. Service in my case is just allowing the user to open HTML pages in a
windows form application inside a WebBrowser control. The user of the
application can't modify the URL.
4. The running service always turns off as the application gets closed. Next
time it will be launched with some other port.

As you mentioned about the DoS attack. In this case the hacker can make the service unavailable. This should be fine for my case as my service starts and stops multiple times and is short lived.

Kindly correct me if any of my above understanding is wrong.

Thanks,
Shubh

Shubhanshu Pathak 31-Jan-16 1:11am View

Hi Kornfeld,

I have mentioned the reason of the random ports in the below comment.
Can you please throw some light on the concerns which has been mentioned below.

Thanks in advance...
Shubh

Shubhanshu Pathak 27-Jan-16 23:45pm View

Thanks to all of you for providing comments and solutions...

@SA...
The idea of random port is like this.
1. I just picked a port range (5000 - 9000)
2. Now using the System.Net.NetworkInformation.IPGlobalProperties interface got all
the ports
3. Just looped through them to get the free port.
4. This is just to avoid my listener to hook to a already in-use port.

With random port I am not trying to solve any security issue...

@All...
when a hacker tries to get the open port from a machine where this application is running definitely he will get this port opened by my application.
But in this port already a service is running which doesn't expose anything. Even if he/she will get the url format which I am using, it can't be browsed from any other machine (say, by replacing localhost with IP of the m/c)

So from this port -
1. can the hacker damage anything else on the machine?
2. Can he gets access to something which is vulnerable?

Many Thanks,
Shubh

Shubhanshu Pathak 4-Jan-13 5:22am View

Can someone please help...

Shubhanshu Pathak 27-Dec-12 2:20am View

Thanks for the reply Sergey. My initial approach was using WPF only. I achieved the functionality as well but the Memory consumption was too much and was not acceptable. So the next probable solution was using DirectX. Hence I went for it.

Comments by Shubhanshu Pathak (Top 5 by date)