Abstract: Sharing access to resources using an inter-process communication (“IPC”) provides a connection in which references to resources are passed from a sender to a receiver in a trusted third party environment. A sender in possession of a reference to a resource, such as a handle to an object, may initiate the connection with the receiver. In turn, the receiver may accept or refuse the connection, and may further specify the types of resources in which the receiver is interested when accepting through the connection. Sharing access to resources in this manner advantageously insures that only a process that already has access to a resource is able to share that access with another process, and further that only processes that wish to do so will accept such access.

Abstract: Sharing access to resources using an inter-process communication (“IPC”) provides a connection in which references to resources may be passed from a sender to a receiver in a trusted third party environment. A sender in possession of a reference to a resource, such as a handle to an object, may initiate the connection with the receiver. In turn, the receiver may accept or refuse the connection, and may further specify the types of resources in which the receiver is interested when accepting through the connection. Sharing access to resources in this manner advantageously insures that only a process that already has access to a resource is able to share that access with another process, and further that only processes that wish to do so will accept such access.

Abstract: The number of copies of a message to be transferred from one process to another process in a computer where each process has a differing address space may be reduced through the use of a message-passing data structure. The sending process generates an operating system service call to copy the message to be transferred into the message-passing data structure. The receiving process need not generate a system service request to the kernel in order to retrieve the sent message and also does not require an additional copy of the transferred message to be made by the kernel, in order to read the message content. The data structure permits a mapping of the message into the address space of the receiving process as well as the address space of the kernel. The inter-process mechanism for exchanging messages provides proper flow control, synchronization, and security when two processes exchange data.