The RPC protocol consists of two phases: negotiating an access point to a service and communicating with the service itself. On the server side the negotiation is performed by a special service called 'Endpoint Mapper' (EPM), which listens on the TCP/UDP port 135. The protocol of the communication is specified in the DCE RPC Specification. If the client is allowed to use the requested service, the EPM passes its address and IP in its response, and the client may connect to it and make any data transfer it wishes. The protocol format varies from service to service, so with maintained transparent forwarding facilities between the client and the service, only the communication between the client and the EPM is filtered.
The filtering of the traffic between the client and the EPM means that requests can be approved or rejected for services specified by their UUID. The denial of a service is implemented as if the EPM had refused it, the approval is transparent in a way that the resulting service access point has the same IP as in the original EPM request: only the port is altered to point to the dedicated forwarder facility.
The timing parameters of the communication may also be limited by specifying the maximal allowed duration of the requests/responses; the idle timeout between requests/responses and the maximal delay between the service approval and the connection to the approved service.
Published on May 30, 2024
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