Are pipes considered dangerous to use in Windows, from a security standpoint?

Question

Are pipes considered dangerous to use in Windows, from a security standpoint?

Answer 1

If you are concerned about network sniffing, I suppose they could be since I don't think that pipes between systems are encrypted. I don't know exactly how they are implemented in Windows, but I would expect that pipes between processes/threads on the same machine would be implemented with shared memory and not let traffic leak outside the box. If you need secure communication between systems, I'd go with secure sockets.

Answer 2

Pipes aren't a particular security risk in Windows. If you're worried about security, make sure you set the security descriptor on the pipe to an appropriate DACL. If your usage requires that the pipe is open for anyone to connect to, then you have to treat the incoming data as suspicious, just like any file or network input.

Answer 3

See This question for a discussion on this topic.