“Google Says New 'Adiantum' Cryptography Will Bring Storage Encryption to All Android Devices”

Google has created a special encryption method for cheaper entry-level smartphones called Adiantum which would be an optional part of Android distributions going forward.

To ensure that all devices are encrypted, Adiantum is an innovation in cryptography, designed to make storage encryption more efficient for devices without cryptographic acceleration, Google wrote in a security blog late on Thursday.

"Adiantum is a new form of encryption that we built specifically to run on phones and smart devices that don't have the specialised hardware to use current methods to encrypt locally stored data efficiently. Adiantum is designed to run efficiently without that specialised hardware. This will make the next generation of devices more secure than their predecessors, and allow the next billion people coming online for the first time to do so safely. Adiantum will help secure our connected world by allowing everything from smartwatches to Internet-connected medical devices to encrypt sensitive data,
"Today, Android offers storage encryption using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Most new Android devices have hardware support for AES via the ARMv8 Cryptography Extensions. However, Android runs on a wide range of devices. This includes not just the latest flagship and mid-range phones, but also entry-level Android Go phones sold primarily in developing countries, along with smartwatches and TVs
In order to offer low-cost options, device manufacturers sometimes use low-end processors such as the ARM Cortex-A7, which does not have hardware support for AES. On these devices, AES is so slow that it would result in poor user experience; apps would take much longer to launch, and the device would generally feel much slower. So while storage encryption has been required for most devices since Android 6.0 in 2015, devices with poor AES performance (50 MiB per second and below) are exempt. We've been working to change this because we believe that encryption is for everyone," the post added.

On cheaper Android devices, AES runs very slow, resulting in longer app-launch time, slowing of device and poor user experience.