Example
Suppose there is a phone card available for sale that offers telephone service by entering the serial number printed on the card. Alice legitimately purchases a phone card in order to call Bob, and her card has the serial number 0003. The attacker, Mallory, also purchases two phone cards, and notices that the serial numbers printed on her phone cards are 0001 and 0002. After consuming the value on cards 0001 and 0002, Mallory guesses the algorithm used for generating these serial numbers is a simple sequence and predicts that 0003 is a valid serial number, enters 0003 when prompted, and gets additional phone service. When Alice tries to use her card she discovers the value has been stolen from it and it is now worthless.
Read more about this topic: Predictable Serial Number Attack
Famous quotes containing the word example:
“Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)