In telecommunications, a scrambler is a device that transposes or inverts signals or otherwise encodes a message at the sender's side to make the message unintelligible at a receiver not equipped with an appropriately set descrambling device. Whereas encryption usually refers to operations carried out in the digital domain, scrambling usually refers to operations carried out in the analog domain. Scrambling is accomplished by the addition of components to the original signal or the changing of some important component of the original signal in order to make extraction of the original signal difficult. Examples of the latter might include removing or changing vertical or horizontal sync pulses in television signals; televisions will not be able to display a picture from such a signal. Some modern scramblers are actually encryption devices, the name remaining due to the similarities in use, as opposed to internal operation.

In telecommunications and recording, a scrambler (also referred to as a randomizer) is a device that manipulates a data stream before transmitting. The manipulations are reversed by a descrambler at the receiving side. Scrambling is widely used in satellite, radio relay communications and PSTN modems. A scrambler can be placed just before a FEC coder, or it can be placed after the FEC, just before the modulation or line code. A scrambler in this context has nothing to do with encrypting, as the intent is not to render the message unintelligible, but to give the transmitted data useful engineering properties.

A scrambler replaces sequences (referred to as whitening sequences) with other sequences without removing undesirable sequences, and as a result it changes the probability of occurrence of vexatious sequences. Clearly it is not foolproof as there are input sequences that yield all-zeros, all-ones, or other undesirable periodic output sequences. A scrambler is therefore not a good substitute for a line code, which, through a coding step, removes unwanted sequences.

A scrambler (or randomizer) can be either:

There are two main reasons why scrambling is used:

Scramblers are essential components of physical layer system standards besides interleaved coding and modulation. They are usually defined based on linear-feedback shift registers (LFSRs) due to their good statistical properties and ease of implementation in hardware.

It is common for physical layer standards bodies to refer to lower-layer (physical layer and link layer) encryption as scrambling as well. This may well be because (traditional) mechanisms employed are based on feedback shift registers as well.

Some standards for digital television, such as DVB-CA and MPE, refer to encryption at the link layer as scrambling.