ToolTalk
More info
- Creator
- Sun Microsystems
- Type
- Messaging system (IPC)
Sun's message bus for desktop applications, letting them hand jobs to one another — and better remembered for its security holes.
ToolTalk came out of Sun in the early 90s with OpenWindows and was later folded into CDE. The idea was that applications shouldn't need to know about each other: one sent a message such as "edit this file" or "display this document", and the session daemon ttsession found whoever had registered to handle it. Messages could also be scoped to files, which required a database server, rpc.ttdbserverd, on every machine.
That server is what gave ToolTalk its reputation. It ran as root, listened on the network via Sun RPC, and had buffer overflows that CERT warned about in 1998 and again in 2002 — remote root on Solaris, AIX and HP-UX. The idea of a shared desktop bus outlived it and came back as D-Bus.