Google’s Adiantum to democratize encryption for all devices

Encryption is very important for the security of our personal data and information. It is the foundation of digital security. You do not have to worry for your personal data if you have storage encryption. Even if data falls into the wrong hands, it would not be stolen. Encryption encodes data so that only a person with the key can read it. This gives you complete control of your key and allows you to store your personal data securely. However, encryption is not for all smartphones, devices or computers. Many of them will be slowed down to the extent of being unusable for how heavily encryption exhausts resources. Adiantum might end this problem and help make encryption possible for all mobile devices.

Current methods of storage encryption require specialized hardware. Adiantum is built for the phones lacking specialized hardware or the low end phones which are not equipped with the hardware support for Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Most android devices today offer storage encryption using AES through ARMv8 Cryptography Extensions. However, apart from the high end models, the mid range devices and lower end devices as well as smart watches and smart TVs, all of them use Android. In case of the low end models, the device makers may use cheap processors like ARM Cortex-A7 to control costs. So, encryption would not work on such devices since the apps would launch with delay and the device itself would work very slow. AES is very slow on such devices and the result is a bad user experience. All Android devices since Android 6.0 in 2015 have required encryption except the lower end with AES performance at 50 MiB/s or lower. Google has been trying to make encryption possible for all devices and Adiantum is the answer.

Adiantum is a form of encryption created specifically for the phones and smart devices that do not have the necessary hardware to use current encryption methods and efficiently encrypt the locally stored data. This will be a major advance for the next generation of phones which will be securer than the previous. The world is growing more and more connected and with Adiantum, sensitive data will be secure across all devices from smart watches to the inter connected medical devices. So, there is going to be no compromise on security as Adiantum will make encryption possible for all. Regardless of the price, everyone will have a secure phone and his data secure. Performance will not be an excuse to compromise device and data security.