3 ms·

No, encryption in Android 5.0 works really well, really. It is really well designed, not state-of-art like the one in iOS however it is still leaps ahead from a

by m45t3r 11y ago

No, encryption in Android 5.0 works really well, really. It is really well designed, not state-of-art like the one in iOS however it is still leaps ahead from any other encryption implementation currently in the industry. Perfomance wise, it's great too. I have a Moto X with Android 5.1, running encryption from day one, and didn't even notice any slowdown (and it uses soft encryption, no support for hardaware). Android users seems to care more about benchmarks them security. The fact that Google removed the encryption by default was after all the bitching that people made after some releases showed that Nexus 6 was faster without encryption. However, there is no proof that this had any significant impact on performance, and I think Google put this restriction after a careful study that encryption by default, even on pure software implementation, did not impact usability on devices. OEMs do like benchmarks and likes to be lazy ("no encryption by default means I don't need to create a module implementing encryption that my hardware already supports! less money to spend, more profit!") because this makes people buy more phones, so they probably pressured Google to remove default encryption because encryption "makes performance looks worse" (on paper, not in real life). If I was part of the midia, I would do a blind test running Nexus 6 with both encryption enabled and disabled. This would show if the performance impact was significant. But the majority of midia prefers the easier way using benchmarks, so we had all these Android users crying rivers that they lost performance. Serious, wtf.

cnvogel 11y ago
Compared to "no encryption", a S4 mini (Dual-core 1.7 GHz. 1.5 GB RAM) is almost unusable (~30 seconds to switch to an app that's stale, i.e. not one of the last few apps used) under Cyanogenmod 12.1 with full disk encryption on. Without encryption is was ~"ok" to use, not fast, but bearable.
- bad_user 11y ago
  When speaking of disk encryption the bottleneck is the CPU. In order for encryption to work without a noticeable performance hit you need a microprocessor with hardware acceleration for AES. For example the latest Intel and AMD processors have the AES-NI instruction set. Ditto for the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC. I'm not sure if hardware acceleration is enabled in Nexus 6, but the hardware is certainly capable of acceleration. I now have an encrypted Nexus 6 and the performance is fine. My previous Nexus 4 was also encrypted and after encryption the performance hit was noticeable when booting up, but after boot it performs fine. 30 seconds to switch an app that's stale sounds like there's something really wrong either with your device or with the Cyanogenmod version you've got installed, judging by those specs at least.
  - m45t3r 11y ago
    In modern processors the bottleneck generally is the IO. While it is not the same think (desktop vs phone processors), this author benchmarks OpenSSL in an algorithm similar that Android uses, with and without AES-NI (Intel HW encryption): https://mjanja.ch/2013/11/disabling-aes-ni-on-linux-openssl/ https://mjanja.ch/2013/11/disabling-aes-ni-on-linux-openssl/. Even without AES-NI, this processor is doing more than 100MB/s of encryption. Mobile storage is a lot worse than this (like less than 50MB/s in sustained sequential writes), and you have to remember this would be the worst case (since the majority of writes for common users is small files instead of big files). Just to put in perspective: my Moto X can write around ~20MB/s when transferring files by USB 2.0. And it can still write the same ~20MB/s with encryption on.
madeofpalk 11y ago
> not state-of-art like the one in iOS however it is still leaps ahead from any other encryption implementation currently in the industry. Considering the industry Android is in is essentially only iOS and Android, that makes them the worst in the industry...
- m45t3r 11y ago
  There is Windows Phone if you only consider "industry" mobile phones, however I was considering the whole personal computing industry. In this case, includes Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and you get the idea. Or you only encrypt your phone and leaves your notebook unecrypted? This would be silly.
deleted 11y ago
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by m45t3r 11y ago

cnvogel 11y ago

Compared to "no encryption", a S4 mini (Dual-core 1.7 GHz. 1.5 GB RAM) is almost unusable (~30 seconds to switch to an app that's stale, i.e. not one of the last few apps used) under Cyanogenmod 12.1 with full disk encryption on. Without encryption is was ~"ok" to use, not fast, but bearable.

bad_user 11y ago
When speaking of disk encryption the bottleneck is the CPU. In order for encryption to work without a noticeable performance hit you need a microprocessor with hardware acceleration for AES. For example the latest Intel and AMD processors have the AES-NI instruction set. Ditto for the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC. I'm not sure if hardware acceleration is enabled in Nexus 6, but the hardware is certainly capable of acceleration. I now have an encrypted Nexus 6 and the performance is fine. My previous Nexus 4 was also encrypted and after encryption the performance hit was noticeable when booting up, but after boot it performs fine. 30 seconds to switch an app that's stale sounds like there's something really wrong either with your device or with the Cyanogenmod version you've got installed, judging by those specs at least.
- m45t3r 11y ago
  In modern processors the bottleneck generally is the IO. While it is not the same think (desktop vs phone processors), this author benchmarks OpenSSL in an algorithm similar that Android uses, with and without AES-NI (Intel HW encryption): https://mjanja.ch/2013/11/disabling-aes-ni-on-linux-openssl/ https://mjanja.ch/2013/11/disabling-aes-ni-on-linux-openssl/. Even without AES-NI, this processor is doing more than 100MB/s of encryption. Mobile storage is a lot worse than this (like less than 50MB/s in sustained sequential writes), and you have to remember this would be the worst case (since the majority of writes for common users is small files instead of big files). Just to put in perspective: my Moto X can write around ~20MB/s when transferring files by USB 2.0. And it can still write the same ~20MB/s with encryption on.

madeofpalk 11y ago

> not state-of-art like the one in iOS however it is still leaps ahead from any other encryption implementation currently in the industry. Considering the industry Android is in is essentially only iOS and Android, that makes them the worst in the industry...

m45t3r 11y ago
There is Windows Phone if you only consider "industry" mobile phones, however I was considering the whole personal computing industry. In this case, includes Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and you get the idea. Or you only encrypt your phone and leaves your notebook unecrypted? This would be silly.

deleted 11y ago

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