Base Services Utility Library Overview

Base Services Utility Library (BSUL) is a Symbian platform component used by the system servers (such as messaging server, sensor server and so on) to sanitise and validate the Inter-Process Communication (IPC) messages. It can also be used to cache F32 drive information and base64-based encoding and decoding.

BSUL details

The DLL that provides the functionality is bsul.dll and the library to which your code must link is bsul.lib.

Description

System servers are vulnerable to IPC attack if they do not sanitise the incoming IPC messages. This might lead to the system server to panic that forces the device to reboot, and make the error tracking difficult. To handle these issues, BSUL provides IPC message sanitisation mechanism to improve the robustness under the IPC attack.

A system server must use BSUL to sanitise incoming IPC messages and validate them against the constraints in a message schema used to store the messages. It can also be used for caching drive information, base64-based encoding and decoding, handling errors and logging.

APIs

The key classes of BSUL are:

API Description

CClientMessage

Wrapper around RMessage2 that provides message validation and error handling to improve robustness of system servers under IPC attack.

CCachedDriveInfo

Cache F32 drive information.

Base64Codec

Base64-based encoding and decoding.