The NDA makes this even more suspicious. Who's the hardware provider? Huawei?
The purpose is anti-competitive, preventing NXP's competitors from learning how the devices work. These devices often have advanced hardware and firmware countermeasures.
The secure modules are considered weapons technology if they're allowed to be updated after sale; the company is responsible for tracking each one, they're impossible to ship overseas, etc.
It's not suspicious, it's SOP. Choose between open and secure, or make your own silicon.
Keeping implementation details secret DOES make it harder for a hacker to compromise them. When used as a defence on top of a decent security infrastructure. "Security through obscurity" is when a company only uses the secrecy as a defence. This is not true:
> they're all reliant on security by obscurity
They're generally reliant on some secure and proven methods of security, with a layer of design obscurity over the top (and in practice as others have pointed out, they don't keep the design secret for security reasons, they do it for commercial ones).
Nah.
"Youbico isn't saying that the security of the device is increased by keeping the source code secret."
Yeah, they're not really saying anything other than trying to provide an excuse for why they won't release it. "You can't use it anyway" isn't much of a response (I actually find it rather patronizing and dismissive).
Not to pile on, but regarding: "Engineering is always full of trade-offs."... what exactly is the supposed trade off here? (Maybe they're using licensed code that they can't redistrib?)