DISTRIBUTED COMPONENT

OBJECT MODEL -

A STUDY OF ITS ARCHITECTURE

AND WHY IT IS CONSIDERED A
FAILURE BY EXPERTS.
DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING
PROTOCOLS
•CORBA

•Java’s RMI

•DCOM
 ADVANTAGES OF DISTRIBUTED
COMPUTING
• Speeding up development processes
• Improving deployment flexibility
• Lowering maintenance costs
• Improving scalability
• Load balancing
 REGISTRIES AND KEYS
• A Registry is the place where the
components installed in a machine store
their settings.
• The ‘registry’ contains many sections
called keys. The keys contain value data
such as Class ID and Application ID.
ARCHITECTURE OF DCOM
 THE FIVE COMPONENTS OF
DCOM
• Object Instantiation Process
• Data transferring between clients and
components
• Security in DCOM
• The DCE RPC component
• The low-level protocol stack
 OBJECT INSTANTIATION
PROCESS
• Clients use COM’s "create instance"
functions such as CoCreateInstanceEx,
CoGetClassObject, etc. to create a new
instance of a component.

• To specify the server on which a

component resides, DCOM employs the
notion of RemoteServerName
Data transferring between clients
and components
• Marshaling : is the process of reading
parameters from the stack into a flat
memory buffer (that will be transferred
across "the wire" later.)
• Unmarshaling :it reads the memory buffer
and re-creates the stack that is the same
as the caller’s stack.
 Security in DCOM

• Access Security

• Launch Security

• Identity Security

• Connection Policy
 IS DCOM AN UNQUALIFIED
SUCCESS?
• Initially, DCOM was a major competitor
to CORBA.

• There were difficulties in getting them

to work over internet firewalls.

• DCOM and CORBA lost out to web

browsers combined with http requests.
 THE MS-BLASTER WORM
• DCOM RPC Interface Buffer Overrun Vulnerability
• TCP port 135 is overrun by a large amount of data
• This allows the remote system to gain local system
privileges on tcp port 4444.
• In essence it causes a ‘DENIAL OF SERVICE’ error
for microsoftupdate.com.
• Microsoft did come up with a patch to rectify the
‘buffer overrun in msrpc’. The patch is available at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/M
S03-026.mspx.
 DCOM SUPPORTERS
All said and done DCOM is not without its
supporters.

• SAP
• DUNN and BRADSTREET
• SYBASE