Android Explorations

Some six months after the first early access chapters were announced , my book has now officially been  released . While the final ebook PDF has been available for a few weeks, you can now get all ebook formats (PDF, Mobi and ePub) directly from the publisher, No Starch Press . Print books are also ready and should start shipping tomorrow (Oct 24th). You can use the code UNDERTHEHOOD  when checking out for a 30% discount in the next few days. The book will also be available from  O'Reilly ,  Amazon  and other retailers in the coming weeks. This book would not have been possible without the efforts of Bill Pollock and Alison Law from No Starch, who edited, refined and produced my raw writings. +Kenny Root   reviewed all chapters and caught some embarrassing mistakes, all that are left are mine alone. Jorrit “ Chainfire ” Jongma reviewed my coverage of SuperSU and Jon “ jcase ” Sawyer contributed the foreword. Once again, a big tha...

In iOS 8, Apple has expanded the scope of data encryption and now mixes in the user's passcode with an unextractable hardware UID when deriving an encryption key, making it harder to extract data from iOS 8 devices. This has been somewhat of a hot topic lately, with opinions ranging from praise for Apple's new focus on serious security, to demands for "golden keys" to mobile devices to be magically conjured up. Naturally, the debate has spread to other OS's, and Google has announced that the upcoming Android L release will also have disk encryption enabled by default . Consequently, questions and speculation about the usefulness and strength of Android's disk encryption have sprung up on multiple forums, so this seems like a good time to take another look at its implementation. While Android L still hasn't been released yet, some of the improvements to disk encryption it introduces are apparent in the preview release, so this post will briefly introduce...