Skip to content

grayed/PipeExplorer

Repository files navigation

PipeExplorer

A Windows named pipe monitoring GUI. Requires administrator priviledges to run.

Features

  • Displays name and number of active/maximum connections, like pipelist.exe from SysInternals Suite does.
  • Highlights newly created and removed pipes, like Process Explorer from SysInternals Suite does.
  • Displays ACLs (for non-busy pipes).
  • Gives hints about well-known pipe names.
  • Pipe pinning, allowing to place all the pipes you're interested in together.
  • Multilanguage support (English and Russian for now).

Screenshot!

Known issues

  • The NPFS driver doesn't keep timestamps of pipe creation, so the creation timestamp is determined by the time the named pipe is first seen.
  • The named pipes that get quickly created and deleted (or deleted and re-created) between scans won't be noticed about at all.
  • The ACLs could not be extracted from pipes without a free server end. Also, for the same reason reading of ACLs may disrupt processes trying to connect to the same ACL.
    • This could work like a hint for "is there any free server pipe end?" question, though.

All of those could be fixed by installing a filesystem filter driver which will gather and export this information. Unfortunately, somebody needs to write such driver first.

TODO

  • More/better hints (see the GetHintFor() function in Models/PipeModel.cs).
  • Keep selected line in view when many named pipes gets created or deleted.