Guardicore has announced the availability of IPCDump, a new open source tool for tracing interprocess communication on Linux.

The tool covers most interprocess communication (IPC) mechanisms, including pipes, fifos, signals, Unix sockets, loopback-based networking, and pseudoterminals, and is useful for debugging multi-process applications and gaining transparency into how they communicate with one another in their IT environment.

Modern applications have distinct processes that plug into one another in a black box, creating significant challenges for developers when something breaks. This issue is particularly true for debugging complex multiprocess applications. IPCDump solves this problem by tracing both the metadata and contents of apps’ communication and tracing IPC between short-lived processes.

Security practitioners can also use the open source tool to explore how business apps communicate with internal and external systems.

Moreover, IPCDump can easily track short-lived processes’ creation and destruction, a tedious task that typically requires security and IT teams to check port numbers against netstat manually.

Additional features include: Support for pipes and FIFOs, Loopback IPC, Signals (regular and real-time), Unix streams and datagrams, Pseudoterminal-based IPC, Event filtering based on process PID or name and Human-friendly or JSON-formatted output.