TCP/IP Sequence Number Analysis

johnwbyrd writes "Upon connection via TCP/IP to a host, the host generates an Initial Sequence Number (ISN). It's important to design ISN generation sequences so remote attackers can't predict an ISN (this is called a "blind spoofing" attack). Using phase space analysis you can check the quality of ISNs generated on various OSes. Windows 98's graph is quite pretty."

Comments

Hit them. Hard.

[Krapangor]

An attractor is a shape that is specific to the given PRNG function, and reveals the complex nature of dependencies between subsequent results generated by the implementation.

The author should be hit with a stick.
Hard.
Several times.
There is a standard definition for an attractor in mathematics.
If the author wants to use mathematics, then he should use the well-agreed mathematical definitions and not vague pseudo-mathematical babble.
And yes, I am a mathematician.

What they basically do is to guess the (internal) dimension of the system and trying to get non-trivial attracting set out of it. It's a rather trivial fact that if you get both things right, you can attack the PRNG. However, a decent PRNG won't have any non-trivial attractors.