> All security is through solutions being obscure. I don't understand this criticism. Encryption just puts mathematical bounds on the obscurity
There is a difference. Once somebody writes a tool to unravel the obscurity, it is simple and fast for everybody to break the security.
Not so with encryption (if used properly, with changing keys, one-time passwords, etc.)
> Once somebody writes a tool to unravel the obscurity, it is simple and fast for everybody to break the security.
Yes, it has a lower bound. But that tool has a high obscurity level itself. So the lower bound on breaking the security is finding someone who can write that tool.
Not great, but decent to buy time, as I said before :)
Security is measured through degrees and layers. No secure system is provably secure to all attacks. Something like the above would definitely add a lot to the cost of attempting to understand the data flow, and that shouldn't be discounted. If I were building a root kit/drm, this would be a pretty decent way for me to hide data and computation long enough for me to adapt, away from the tools and patterns people understand.
Security through many layers of obscurity is how our internet doesn't fall apart. Just think about the massive amounts of plaintext email you can sniff between servers.