Google Details Their New Adiantum Encryption For Low-End Android Devices

With the upcoming Linux 5.0 kernel release there is initial support for Adiantum and implemented within the fscrypt file-system encryption framework in Google's pursuit to offering more viable data encryption on low-end Android devices.

Google engineers began working on Adiantum following the fall-out from their plans for using the NSA-developed Speck for encryption on low-end devices, with Speck widely believed to have been backdoor'ed by the National Security Agency.

Google was successful in making Adiantum faster than AES for low-tier Android devices with ARM SoCs lacking dedicated crypto extensions. The results posted by Google today show Adiantum to offer 5.6x better encryption and decryption performance compared to AES-256-XTS when running on an ARM Cortex-A7.

The Linux kernel bits around Adiantum are rolling out in Linux 5.0 upstream while Google says that in Android Q is where they will be making this encryption tech part of the Android platform.

Those wanting to read more about Adiantum can swing by Google's security blog.