History
CSA was largely kept secret until 2002. The patent papers gave some hints, but important details, like the layout of the so-called S-boxes, remained secret. Without these free implementations of the algorithm were out of question. Initially, CSA was to remain implemented in hardware only, and this would have made it difficult to reverse engineer existing implementations.
In 2002 FreeDec was released, implementing CSA in software. Though released as binary only, disassembly revealed the missing details and allowed reimplementation of the algorithm in higher-level programming languages.
With CSA now publicly known in its entirety, cryptanalysts started looking for weaknesses.
Read more about this topic: Common Scrambling Algorithm
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“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
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