Hardware-accelerated disk encryption in Android 5.1
In a previous post we looked at disk encryption enhancements introduced in Android 5.0. That article was written based on the Lollipop preview release, before the platform source code was available, and while the post got most of the details about hardware-backed key protection right (the official documentation has since been released), it appears that it was overly optimistic in expecting that high-end Lollipop devices will ship with hardware-accelerated disk encryption. Android 5.0 did come with disk encryption enabled by default (at least on Nexus devices), but FDE also brought some performance problems , and many Android enthusiasts rushed to disable it . While slower disk access generally doesn't affect perceived performance when using a particular app, longer load times can add up and result in slower switching between apps, as well as longer boot times. In order to improve performance without sacrificing device security Android 5.1 integrated support for hardware-accelerat...