Android Enthusiasts Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for enthusiasts and power users of the Android operating system. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Does anyone posses an official or un-official information on which encryption standard is used in Honeycomb "encrypt tablet" option? Is there an information on any hacks or backdoors, placed for law enforcement and such?
Basically, the question is: if someone loses a tablet with confidential information in it, how probable it is, that the data could be extracted from it despite encryption?
The current encryption scheme is outlined on the Android website's "Notes on the implementation of encryption in Android 3.0" page. From that page, the specific algorithm used is noted as such:
The actual encryption used for the filesystem for first release is 128 AES with CBC and ESSIV:SHA256
That's the only official documentation I've seen for it at this point, but it is fairly lengthy and informative.
So yeah AES 128, that's a big number right? One problem, the key used to encrypt the drive is the same as the key you use to unlock your phone, which is tiny. It would take a grand total of 5 minutes to perform an offline brute force against this tiny keyspace.
WisperCore has a modified android version with more reasonable security measures.
