How secure is your OS
September 12, 2002 09:52 PM
Michal Zalewski has come up with the newer version of his earlier paper on "Strange Attractors and TCP/IP Sequence Number Analysis". Well, didn't quite get it? Its basically about IP sequence numbers. These ISNs as they are called, are generated by the host whenever a TCP connection is established. These numbers are used to keep track of the packets for the session. Now the problem lies in the fact that these numbers can be guessed. If the next ISN is guessed correctly, an attacker can hijack a connection by spoofing ip addresses of the source address. So all depends on how random the ISNs can be. Michal found that Windows still lags far behind in true random number generation. *BSD leads all the way. Check it out. Great paper!
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