I am writing a tcp - ip application. Is there any way I can prevent a socket (or an active connection) from being stolen by another program?
For example : s = socket(AF_INET,SOCK_STREAM,0), here s is the descriptor for the socket. And if another program running on my machine steals the file descriptor, it can potentially start communicating with the server on the port that is bound to this socket later on.
I tried doing a google search and came across setsockopt() system call. In windows there seems to be an option called "SO_EXCLUSIVEADDRUSE". I could not find this option listed in <sys/socket.h>

Thanks in advance.

In what way do you anticipate another program "stealing" the file descriptor? Only your process or another process fork()ed from it could gain access to the FD. Once you have a socket bound to a port, no other application can use that port while your process is doing so.

So you mean that a virus cannot read/ write stuff on the port that is being used by my application? Can you point me to any documentation that says that?

thanks in advance.