Since Java 5 developers have the possibility to define so called pre-main hooks to manipulate the execution of a Java program at runtime with Java agents. An agent as part of the classpath is triggered before execution of the main method and therefor can be used to either filter calls to or even manipulate the underlying Java code. A tool for code manipulation is javassists. Apache Ranger for example is using both java agents and javassits to override the authorization mechanism of components of the Hadoop stack. This together with Ranger Stacks could also be used to secure existing code unchanged during runtime.

In this post we are going to look a very basic example of using Java agents to manipulate existing code. Continue reading “A Java Agent Example (-javaagent)” →