Android Nougat's new file-based encryption is a move in the right direction, but Google's efforts to achieve lock screen security are still six years behind iOS
Over the past few years we've heard more about smartphone encryption than, quite frankly, most of us expected to hear in a lifetime. Tweets: @matthew_d_green , @imgustavog , @steipete , and @csoghoian Tweets: Matthew Green / @matthew_d_green : I wrote up some thoughts on what I view as the limitations of Android N's new device encryption: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.co m/ ... Gustavo Garcia / @imgustavog : An Android FDE phone it will never evict its cryptographic keys from RAM. And this is not goodhttps://blog.cryptographyengineerin g.com/ 2016/11/24/android-n-encryption/ ... Peter Steinberger / @steipete : “One thing you might have noticed is that where Apple had four categories of protection, Android N only has two.” https://blog.cryptographyengineering.co m/ ... Christopher Soghoian / @csoghoian : Android encryption sucks and still isn't as good as iOS was 6 years ago. A sobering deep dive by @matthew_d_green. http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com / ...
Context & Ripple Effects
Google shipped file-based encryption in Android Nougat, its second attempt at making encryption standard after the Marshmallow requirement that new devices enable full-disk encryption when their AES performance clears 50 MiB/s. The stakes are visible in the adoption gap: as of early 2016, fewer than 10% of the world's 1.4B Android phones were encrypted versus 95% of iPhones.
The reception from cryptographers is skeptical rather than celebratory. Matthew Green's writeup and Gustavo Garcia's observation that an Android FDE phone 'will never evict its cryptographic keys from RAM' frame Nougat as progress that still leaves lock screen security roughly six years behind iOS — a gap made concrete by the [[a:871032|publicly-available exploit code that extracts disk encryption keys from unpatched Qualcomm-chip Android devices]].
First-order effects
- Because Nougat's file-based encryption keeps cryptographic keys resident in RAM, the physical-attack surface Green and Garcia flag stays open even on encrypted devices — the upgrade hardens storage at rest without matching iOS's post-unlock protections.
- Device makers shipping Nougat inherit a security story they can market as 'encrypted,' while Apple's 95%-encrypted installed base remains the benchmark the critique measures Google against.
Second-order effects
- Chip suppliers like Qualcomm face renewed scrutiny over key-extraction vulnerabilities, since publicly-available attack code against unpatched devices undermines whatever assurances the OS-level encryption provides.
- The documented gap pressures Google to iterate faster on lock screen security, because encryption coverage statistics — 10% versus 95% — are becoming a headline comparison point between the two platforms.
Third-order effects
- If each Android release narrows the gap incrementally while fragmentation slows deployment across the installed base, platform-level security diverges into a two-tier market where iOS sets the ceiling and most Android devices trail years behind.
- Even iOS is not static here: later analysis of how iPhone security degrades after first unlock shows post-unlock data exposure is a shared frontier, suggesting the long-run contest is over protecting a running device, not just encrypted storage.
The trend: Smartphone encryption is shifting from optional storage protection to a platform-defining security baseline, with Android's fragmented rollout keeping it structurally behind iOS's hardware-integrated model.