Android Explorations

Why password-based encryption is needed There are various reasons why one would want to encrypt data in an Android application: to make sure that files exported to shared storage (SD card, etc.) are not easily accessible to other apps; to encrypt sensitive information (such as authentication information for third-party services) stored by the app or to provide some sort of a DRM-like scheme where content is only accessible to users who own the appropriate key to access it. The Android SDK includes the Java Cryptography Extension  (JCE) interfaces that provide easy access to common cryptographic operations, and all mainstream Android devices come with JCE providers that implement current symmetric encryption algorithms such as AES. Thus encrypting application data is fairly easily accomplished in Android by using standard APIs. However, as in other systems, the harder part is not performing the actual cryptographic operations, but key management. If a key is stored along with...