The present invention provides for validating that one or more modules reside on the same machine. When a second module wishes to establish communication with a first module, a shared memory that is accessible by the modules--but inaccessible by modules outside the machine--is used to store random data. The first module listens on a transport address corresponding to the random data for communication activity. The second module retrieves the random data from the shared memory, and then uses this data for determining the appropriate transport address to send information to when establishing the communication with the first module.