Silence on the Wire

Delayed Coordinates: Taking Pictures of Time Sequences

When dealing with a black-box ISN generator in one of today’s closed-source systems, you see only its output, a sequence of 32-bit values carried by TCP/IP packets, not the underlying algorithm. For many operating systems, the code is proprietary and well guarded, quite beyond the reach of mere mortals. Even in an open-source system, the sources can be tricky and misleading, and you can end up following the same mistakes as the original developer.

The typical input we would have to evaluate would likely look similar to this:

S0 = 244782
S1 = 245581
S2 = 246380
S3 = 247176
S4 = 247975
S5 = 248771
...

Is the dependency in these numbers immediately obvious? And if so, is there is a relatively universal ...