[benchaney]

> I haven't seen anything that explains how scrambling and descrambling work; but it's important to understand that, at a certain level, all encryption is "security by obscurity." It just comes down to how easy or hard it is to figure out how to bypass. In this case, hacking to get ahold of the scrambler is no different than getting ahold of the private part of a key pair.

This isn’t true at all. There is a very significant fundamental difference between obscure information and secret information. Obscure information is by its nature known to many people. There are likely hundreds (if not thousands) of engineers who had access to the code or design documents that describe the scrambler. Information about it was probably given to sales people and representatives at other companies, and transmitted insecurely over a variety of communication mediums. Compare that to secret information, which is known only to the parties using it to authenticate.

Perhaps you could argue that in this case, security by obscurity was not the reason that the system failed, but that isn’t the same as saying all encryption isn’t security by obscurity.