Android Lollipop’s default encryption comes at a significant performance price

  • 21 November 2014
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By Stephen Schenck | November 20, 2014
 
In software, very rarely is an operation “free.” Want that menu to have a cute scroll-down animation when you tap it? Sure, but that’s going to take up processor time: you can have a system without it that runs slightly faster, or keep the animation and suffer a tiny performance hit. Our desire for attractive, rich software is often compensated for by the arrival of increasingly powerful SoCs, but that still doesn’t change the fact that the more we ask our phone to do, the slower the same hardware’s going to run. With Android 5.0 Lollipop, Google is making its platform’s full-disk encryption enabled by default for new devices. Encryption sound good (so good that it’s making the government nervous), but what’s the cost for all this new data encryption and decryption taking place behind the scenes? An analysis prepared with a special unencrypted Nexus 6 suggests that it’s quite high.
 
http://pocketnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/nexus-6-encrypt.png
 
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