Service Virtualization

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Resolved: Software Protection Service (sppsvc.exe)

  • 1.  Resolved: Software Protection Service (sppsvc.exe)

    Posted Apr 29, 2019 08:17 AM

    I felt the need to post this after going round and round with this issue.  By the way thank you CA/Broadcom Technical Support for all the help.  You guys are great.  We had a service running nightly, Microsoft's Software Protection Service (SPS), which would cause virtual services to stop and eventually create a non-responding VSE condition.  I re-scheduled this service to only run once weekly while the VSE's are stopped.  This resolves the issues.  Another partial solution to the non-responding VSEs is to make sure you do not have a blank base path.  Although this does not totally fix the issues it does minimize the effects of the SPS. Here is one of the interesting things that SPS does: It sends requests to all our virtual services in an attempt to drill down and find vulnerabilities. When it gets a response from the virtual service it then reformats another request and repeats the process.  This goes on for ~13 transactions and creates errors in our virtual services and log files.  By the way I endorsed having a blank base path because we can essentially enable a "help" command by having the blank base path.  This is done by changing the response in the "Service Image" section of the vsi and encoding a message in the <faultstring> with help information like a url to a spreadsheet containing valid requests.