To hack an Android phone, just type in a really long password

Re:To hack an Android phone, just type in a really long pass... by mehrdada on Monday September 21, 2015 @11:06AM (#10252768)

Yes. It requires serious engineering across the OS stack though. Also, it is generally harder and less effective to this retroactively; existing third party apps may not switch to leverage the new APIs when it is done retroactively. This makes it hard for PC operating systems to effectively adopt it, though I really hope they do it soon.

Right now it seems the low hanging fruit for Android would be to encrypt devices _at all_ (by default). Different classes of encryption is a luxury.

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Re:To hack an Android phone, just type in a really long pass... by crazysim on Monday September 21, 2015 @12:52PM (#10253517)

I did hear they did encrypt by default on the Nexus 6. Unfortunately, it seriously affected performance and was then turned off. I guess this may be due not having a fast hardware encryption path to and from the flash memory.

iOS encrypts, even if you don't set a passphrase or something and their security white paper does mention having dedicated hardware to make it seamless.

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Re:To hack an Android phone, just type in a really long pass... by andrewpi on Monday September 21, 2015 @01:34PM (#10253804)

I believe a later software update for the Nexus 6 sped up encryption considerably.

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Re:To hack an Android phone, just type in a really long pass... by Glide on Monday September 21, 2015 @02:30PM (#10254206)

How do I check if encryption is turned on for a Nexus 6?

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Re:To hack an Android phone, just type in a really long pass... by azernik on Monday September 21, 2015 @04:37PM (#10254966)

If an Android device has encrypted storage, it has to ask you for the decryption password before it will boot (ie BEFORE you get to a lock screen). If it doesn't, then it's not encrypted.

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