Database Users

[Q] encryption...

has anyone done this yet? I noticed it in the settings, but it said it can take up to 1 hour... just wondered if it was worth while.
if you have done it, does it slow anything down, and how long did it take you to run?
Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk

iamdarren said:
has anyone done this yet? I noticed it in the settings, but it said it can take up to 1 hour... just wondered if it was worth while.
if you have done it, does it slow anything down, and how long did it take you to run?
Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I tried but it appears to not work. You have to be plugged in and fully charged (seems to work from 90% ish), and you have to have unlock PIN set. But once you have selected and confirmed encryption, the screen blanks except for a green line drawing of an Android logo, and then after a minute or so the screen blanks out and then you wait...and wait....and wait...and wait. I gave up after 4 hours.
If at any point you switch screen on, you get the PIN prompt: enter PIN, and you're presented with the blank screen with green line diagram of android logo. I've left it like this for several hours. In the end I reset, and got my device back - but still unencrypted. I've also tried without ever trying to log in until at least 4 hours have elapsed, in case the login attempt disturbed the encryption.
I have logged a defect with Asus for this and a couple of other things, and this morning got a response back saying that "We're still looking into this", which seems to suggest that they agree it is a problem.

Cool in gonna try now, at 95percent battery.
Sent from my Transformer TF101 using Tapatalk

That didn't seem to do anything.... I saw the green android with cog body, maybe I need to give it more time. I will set out before i go bed.
Sent from my Transformer TF101 using Tapatalk

I'm wondering how the encryption is handled, is it software or hardware enabled. I have seen with PC's that use software encryption that there is a performance hit and if the encryption is handled by hardware, like a hardware enabled HDD encryption, there is little to no performance hit. The PC I tested the software encryption on took forever to boot vs the hardware enabled one.

Havoc6266 said:
I'm wondering how the encryption is handled, is it software or hardware enabled. I have seen with PC's that use software encryption that there is a performance hit and if the encryption is handled by hardware, like a hardware enabled HDD encryption, there is little to no performance hit. The PC I tested the software encryption on took forever to boot vs the hardware enabled one.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You must have used some strange encryption application or had an old computer.
Try truecrypt - on modern (2 core) computer there is practically no performance hit whatsoever (decrypting and even encrypting on the fly is faster than hard drives - on SSD it could be too slow though). The same goes for standard encryption used by Ubuntu (it's very probable that Android tablets use the same method).
Truecrypt (and probably most other full-disk encryptions too) work like that:
- all the data on hard drive is encrypted (edit: it's encrypted all the time, never, ever is decrypted data written to disk),
- when system reads data - it's decrypted before being send to applications,
- when system writes data - it's encrypted before it's saved to the disk.
Also - Tegra2 should have a part handling encryption and decryption so it could be at least partially hardware encryption.

Your right, it has been a while since I have used encryption due to a bad experience early on. I'll give Truecyrpt a try. The software I used before was Safeguard Easy.

iamdarren said:
That didn't seem to do anything.... I saw the green android with cog body, maybe I need to give it more time. I will set out before i go bed.
Sent from my Transformer TF101 using Tapatalk
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Click to collapse
I left mine overnight, and it still was not encrypted. I had even done a factory reset beforehand to minimize the amount of data to encrypt.
I'm pretty sure this doesn't work. I'll post as soon as I get a reply from Asus.

It did not work, maybe this feature isn't ready yet?
Sent from my Transformer TF101 using Tapatalk

As a feature, it's not ready for prime time. I have it working on the xoom, but every reset it erases my timezone and sets it to GMT. Also, it uses the same PIN as your lock screen, so if you have a numeric pin for easy access, anyone who sees it now knows your encryption password as well. It really should be two different passwords. I intend this weekend to reset my machine and remove the encryption, because it doesn't serve the purpose it was supposed to serve.

Bump. Any info from Asus? I started it at ~7pm. It's midnight, and on the last few power-ups I get nothing except the green android logo after I enter the PIN. So it seems it's still not doing anything? Gonna reset now I guess.

Same problem here with a Transformer TF-101 Build number HRI66.TW_epad-8.2.3.8-20110423
See nothing but a android robot after enter the PIN. 7 hrs later I manually shutdown the machine.

Same here on the Modaco ROM.
Left it on the android pic for 9 hours... it didn't lock the screen or anything, and at the end, the accelerometer still worked when I rotated the screen, but I had to power off and on to get it back.
What does the encryption do, anyway? Does it stop you being able to load files on from the PC? Does it ask for the password when you plug it into the PC?

So no one has been able to get encryption working? I was just going to test this out and saw this thread. Thanks.

I've seen someone talking about some minor issues when running with encryption, so someone got it working.
That MIGHT have been on xoom, but I think it was the transformer.

Just thought I would share my experience with the encryption feature in Honeycomb since some people can't get it working:
At first I couldn't get it working like some people on this thread, I too was stuck on the green wireframe Android for hours on end until I discovered I could still exit back to the homescreen by pressing the home key on the keyboard dock. This happened on both the stock Asus 3.1 ROM and v1.4 of the PRIME! ROM (installed via nvflash).
I then updated recently to v1.5 of PRIME! via CWM and I can report that I was able to encrypt my Transformer after this update. It displayed the green Android wireframe logo for a few seconds, then rebooted and went into the encryption progress page. I had not really done much with the ROM other than change a few small settings and add my Google account, so the encryption was complete in less than an hour. I think the 'hour or more' estimate Google gives within the encryption description text is probably more accurate if you've installed a few more apps afterwards, but of course your timing will vary.
Furthermore I think that the encryption is likely only partial, because I was then able to flash one of the zip files from this thread via CWM without any issues or prompts. Otherwise I'm sure it would've thrown some kind of error such as not being able to mount the system partition or something of that ilk.
Finally (lol ) I also found this page on the Android source website outlining the details of the encyption implementation in Android Honeycomb for anyone interested. There is a mention somewhere of the 128-bit flavour of the AES algorithm being used to encrypt the master key.
Hope this helps anyone trying to get encryption working on their Transformer .

yet another absolutely useless feature, besides bricking the thing for whoever tries to steal it. keeps your data safe.. even from yourself.
i noticed a problem when inserting a microsd (into the pad itself) that it would not be able to boot as long as this is inserted. i am guessing this is because it tries to decrypt the microsd (that is not encrypted) and therefore is stuck in boot.
This is another aspect one should expect if this was a pre-release software. I am extremely disappointed with this product so far, mostly because of the software. most of (not any of the cameras) the hardware (including the keyboard) is pretty good

I did it 2 days ago, and it worked flawless. It tooks about an hour. I use it since and I have no problems at all.
The only thing is that I have to insert the SD card again each time I power on the transformer. Any idea how to change rhat?

fjoesne said:
yet another absolutely useless feature, besides bricking the thing for whoever tries to steal it. keeps your data safe.. even from yourself.
i noticed a problem when inserting a microsd (into the pad itself) that it would not be able to boot as long as this is inserted. i am guessing this is because it tries to decrypt the microsd (that is not encrypted) and therefore is stuck in boot.
This is another aspect one should expect if this was a pre-release software. I am extremely disappointed with this product so far, mostly because of the software. most of (not any of the cameras) the hardware (including the keyboard) is pretty good
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You likely have ASUS to blame for this, as my understanding is that the Thinkpad tablet deals properly (from the spec anyway) with SD cards attached to the device even to the point it can additionally encrypt them. Again we are all early adopters, Honeycomb was sort of an experiment for Google, and Ice Cream Sandwich is the real next version of the andoid platform.
And encryption is hardly a useless feature, it means Google is finally trying to consider enterprise usage of their products which is very important to the further growth of the platform.

[Q] Encrypting Nexus 4 - Some Questions

Hi,
I am thinking about encrypting my Nexus 4. I am already using encryption on all my computers but I never tried it on my smartphone, so there are three questions I hope you will answer:
1)
How is battery life affected? Well, fortunately the battery of the Nexus 4 is quite good and I hope encryption won't waste too much.
2)
How is speed affected? My Desktop CPU has AES-NI and there's a SSD, so you don't even recognize system encryption. How is it doing on the Nexus 4? I'm just doing the usual smartphone stuff, means E-Mail, messaging, phoning, checking News &Weather and sometimes playing Doodle Jump. My research on the Internet about encryption performance on Android didn't bring up things I can really rely on so I hope someone here can tell me his experiences.
3)
Which algorithm is used exactly? I know it's dm_crypt and I'm using it on my other computers, too, but on my PC I can choose which algorithm I want and on Android it's given as far as I know.
Regards,
becha

You can't use patter lock to unlock your screen, which is a pian for me right now.
Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

1. Barely noticeable
2. Same as 1
3. Not sure
Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

1) I doesn't notice any real impact on battery life. Used the N4 several months before encrypting it.
2) Booting the phone is slowed down, and not only because you have to enter the key for accessing the encrypted drive. But opening apps and doing backup, etc. isn't slowed down. I guess I wouldn't even notice an encrypted devices and so did no one until now, while using my phone.
I was also doubtful before, because in my experience, on a laptop back in the days (5 years ago), the battery drain and performance impact was just to big. But on the other side, I do a lot more disk based tasks on my laptop, than I do on my phone.
in short, after I lost my last phone, I really wanted to give it a try and I didn't regret it until now.
Hoping to hear good answers to question 3.

@HB_Mosh
Well, that's not too bad for me because I don't use Unlock Patterns.
@Vanhoud @memleak
Thanks for sharing your experiences, I'll give encryption a shot.

becha said:
@HB_Mosh
Well, that's not too bad for me because I don't use Unlock Patterns.
@Vanhoud @memleak
Thanks for sharing your experiences, I'll give encryption a shot.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
can you please tell us your experiences, i was thinking about it, i guess you can CWM, encrypt then restore backup if you want to revert without starting all over

Yesterday I encrypted my Nexus 4, it took around an half an hour. Until now (well, one day...) I didn't discover any problems apart from the fact, that my Nexus 4 did a simple restart for the first time when trying to encrypt it. Everything went fine when trying the second time. The phone itself runs fluent, so up to now I didn't see any performance problems.

Now I can't backup my ROM - any suggestions? Perhaps Recovery can mount to an external USB storage or something? What a pain! You can't un-encrypt either, and there's no way to mount encrypted storage in Recovery I wanted to backup before installing privacy protection in case it borked my phone.

Another encryption question...
Don't mean to hijack this thread, but can anyone tell me if OTA updates will still work on a stock, unrooted N4 that's been encrypted?
Can't find a definitive answer - some have had success on other devices and others haven't.

I don't see why turning on stock encryption on a stock unmodified device would make any difference?
Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

DroidBois said:
I don't see why turning on stock encryption on a stock unmodified device would make any difference?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I wasn't sure why / if this would make a difference either but as I said, I can't find a definitive answer. Some people say that you need to factory reset in order to remove the encryption before you can apply an OTA update, but others say different.
I'd be interested to know if the OTA would work after simply asking you for your encryption PIN on reboot, or if the encryption would prevent the OTA being applied because of the encrypted storage. Does anyone have any experience of this?

DroidBois said:
Now I can't backup my ROM - any suggestions? Perhaps Recovery can mount to an external USB storage or something? What a pain! You can't un-encrypt either, and there's no way to mount encrypted storage in Recovery I wanted to backup before installing privacy protection in case it borked my phone.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You have to use TWRP Recovery, which is able to mount your encrypted internal storage.

No way.. I thought I'd tried every option I could think of in TWRP but I'll take a closer look.
Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

If you start TWRP, it should automatically ask for your passphrase to read the encrypted internal storage. Latest version of TWRP works for me, older ones had bugs regarding to encrypted devices.

Any 5.1 ROM that isn't horribly slow?

I use CM12.1 on both my N7 2012 and N6 and it's incredibly slow on the N7. Clearing the cache does nothing, trim does nothing, F2FS /cache and /data does nothing and even the stock 5.1.1 image is slow.
I've read everything under the sun about poor NAND, not enough RAM, poor CPU, etc but none of them really make that much sense. I have hardly anything running EVER and I only have a few apps installed for opening documents an such. No Facebook or Email clients or anything that would be running in the background. The built in RAM manager tells me that I usually have over 50% of my RAM free and with such a small number of things running, my CPU usage is low, so I fail to see where the issue lies. I guess the NAND, but I also read articles about how that's kind of a load of bull as someone tested old 2012 N7s that had been heavily used and slow, as well as new ones and the R/W speeds were the same.
The main thing that bothers me about it is the fact that when I do a clean install of the 5.1.1 factory image or even CM12.1, it will be snappy for all of 10 minutes and then suddenly it becomes annoyingly slow. It's by no means unusable, but compared to my Nexus 6 every action feel like it takes 2-3 times a long. Even doing my pattern unlock feels sluggish.
I went back to KitKat tonight and it seems to run much better, but there are some things I've gotten so used to with Lollipop and Holo looks plain ugly now that I'd really rather not use KK. Does ANYBODY know of something I can do to speed it up even a little bit. This almost seems like a kernel related issue to me, seeing as how the N7 has been running off of an old kernel for most of it's life. It makes me wonder if there are some kernel-level things that might be done to help.

admiralspeedy said:
I use CM12.1 on both my N7 2012 and N6 and it's incredibly slow on the N7. Clearing the cache does nothing, trim does nothing, F2FS /cache and /data does nothing and even the stock 5.1.1 image is slow.
I've read everything under the sun about poor NAND, not enough RAM, poor CPU, etc but none of them really make that much sense. I have hardly anything running EVER and I only have a few apps installed for opening documents an such. No Facebook or Email clients or anything that would be running in the background. The built in RAM manager tells me that I usually have over 50% of my RAM free and with such a small number of things running, my CPU usage is low, so I fail to see where the issue lies. I guess the NAND, but I also read articles about how that's kind of a load of bull as someone tested old 2012 N7s that had been heavily used and slow, as well as new ones and the R/W speeds were the same.
The main thing that bothers me about it is the fact that when I do a clean install of the 5.1.1 factory image or even CM12.1, it will be snappy for all of 10 minutes and then suddenly it becomes annoyingly slow. It's by no means unusable, but compared to my Nexus 6 every action feel like it takes 2-3 times a long. Even doing my pattern unlock feels sluggish.
I went back to KitKat tonight and it seems to run much better, but there are some things I've gotten so used to with Lollipop and Holo looks plain ugly now that I'd really rather not use KK. Does ANYBODY know of something I can do to speed it up even a little bit. This almost seems like a kernel related issue to me, seeing as how the N7 has been running off of an old kernel for most of it's life. It makes me wonder if there are some kernel-level things that might be done to help.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Turn off journaling, use trimmer and try Minimal OS

XenonHD and BSZAospLP run fairly well on my N7. I've got the 32GB model, which purportedly has less memory slowdown issues than the original 16GB model, fwiw.
If your flash memory has bad blocks in it, that will slow down your device whenever it tries to read/write data. A full format of the /system /data and /cache partitions may help. I can't remember if there is a way to mark off bad sectors from being used. You'll have to research that. You may have to do a special kind of format to remove bad blocks from use.
Sent from my Nexus 7

GtrCraft said:
Turn off journaling, use trimmer and try Minimal OS
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, disabling journaling did nothing and trimmer does nothing.

Dirty Unicorns with /data and /cache formatted to f2fs works perfectly with my n7 2012. I'd highly recommend it.

I assume you went from a full flash of the latest stock images, flashed latest twrp recovery, formatted f2fs for cache and data, flashed latest stable CM snapshot, and optionally installed the relevant open gapps as linked to on CM's wiki site?
Have you tried running this setup with no additional apps installed? Chrome isn't much better under this CM 12.1 installation than stock 5.1.1 for me, but everything else seems to run about as good as stock 4.4.4. One thing I do is reboot my 2012 N7 every time I put it on the charger

Chroma works fine on my N7.

admiralspeedy said:
Well, disabling journaling did nothing and trimmer does nothing.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Then you clearly did something wrong. Try with a custom rom like Minimal OS, Chroma or Ressurection. And with M kernel

What could I have done wrong? I flashed the file to disable journaling and I've always used trimmer... Disabling journaling literally did nothing.

im right there with you OP, my nexus 7 is ****. Doenst matter what rom, or what format (ext4 or f2fs). I slows to a crawl in a few mins of use, more often than not, takes forever to wake, and then will sometimes just go black before i can unlock, freezes constantly and requires reboots. I hate this piece of ****.

I've added
ro.config.low_ram=true
to the build.prop and I am running the Trimmer app once a day. There is still some lag from time to time, but at least it's useable.

Seeing about 1 hour SoT difference between encrypted and non encrypted.

So I ran both variations for about 3 weeks each., completely stock with locked boot loader where it force encrypts the phone and unlocked with force encryption off.
Both completely stock and same apps and same permissions.
I'm seeing about 1 or more of SoT time difference between the two. The latter, force encryption off, having about 3.5 - 4.5 hours SoT. And completely stock about 2.5 to 3.5 SoT
Anyone else seeing this much difference?
With force encryption off, I regularly got 4 hours of SoT. Whereas in completely stock form I rarely saw 3.5 hours of screen on time
Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

Just picked mine up today. Would love to know if there is that big of a difference.

I might have to try that. How do you turn encryption off? Does it require an unlocked boot loader or root access? I don't want to put my phone in a state where my warranty/insurance would be void but I like the idea of improved battery life.

jimv1983 said:
I might have to try that. How do you turn encryption off? Does it require an unlocked boot loader or root access? I don't want to put my phone in a state where my warranty/insurance would be void but I like the idea of improved battery life.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You need to be unlocked and format data to decrypt.
Also you need a modified kernel to disable forced encryption.

peltus said:
You need to be unlocked and format data to decrypt.
Also you need a modified kernel to disable forced encryption.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's too bad. I guess I'll just deal with my battery life as is.

insang-droid said:
So I ran both variations for about 3 weeks each., completely stock with locked boot loader where it force encrypts the phone and unlocked with force encryption off.
Both completely stock and same apps and same permissions.
I'm seeing about 1 or more of SoT time difference between the two. The latter, force encryption off, having about 3.5 - 4.5 hours SoT. And completely stock about 2.5 to 3.5 SoT
Anyone else seeing this much difference?
With force encryption off, I regularly got 4 hours of SoT. Whereas in completely stock form I rarely saw 3.5 hours of screen on time
Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I started out unencrypted and accidentally encrypted again when flashing the latest build. It does not feel to me that I have that much less SOT though.
What is your usage pattern? Also, how dit you turn force encrypt off? Just a modified boot image or different kernel altogether?

As I understand it by this post.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/nexus-5x/general/guide-how-to-install-custom-recovery-t3231143
force encryption needs to be disabled in order to even put custom recovery?.. I;ll have to check again when I'm back at work (where I leave my USB A to C cable) but even using the skipsoft tool kit. it's the same way. No custom kernel is needed.

peltus said:
I started out unencrypted and accidentally encrypted again when flashing the latest build. It does not feel to me that I have that much less SOT though.
What is your usage pattern? Also, how dit you turn force encrypt off? Just a modified boot image or different kernel altogether?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just modified boot image. No customer kernel. I tried Elemental and found zero difference between stock.
I don't play any games.
- lots of emails and texts sending over picture/multi media.
- facebook and News reading (min 2 hours)
-lots of pictures and video (my 2years old son)
-lots of google play music streaming (min 2 hours a day)
-on LTE most of the day. (i don't connect to work WIFI)
-lots of "OK google" searches

insang-droid said:
Just modified boot image. No customer kernel. I tried Elemental and found zero difference between stock.
I don't play any games.
- lots of emails and texts sending over picture/multi media.
- facebook and News reading (min 2 hours)
-lots of pictures and video (my 2years old son)
-lots of google play music streaming (min 2 hours a day)
-on LTE most of the day. (i don't connect to work WIFI)
-lots of "OK google" searches
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Did you actually wipe your userdata partition though?
Just modifying the boot image does not decrypt your phone.

insang-droid said:
As I understand it by this post.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/nexus-5x/general/guide-how-to-install-custom-recovery-t3231143
force encryption needs to be disabled in order to even put custom recovery?.. I;ll have to check again when I'm back at work (where I leave my USB A to C cable) but even using the skipsoft tool kit. it's the same way. No custom kernel is needed.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Is this the guide you followed?
It doesn't seem to be actual anymore. We're on a different build now.
If you use the latest twrp you don't need to decrypt anymore (to use the custom recovery fully).
Best bookmark Heisenberg's guide to root/unlock/flash. It's on this forum somewhere.

I took the decrypt option using skipsoft tool kit on 6.0.1. I believe it gives you option to pick, and I picked the decrypt route. And yes I did have to wipe user partition.
Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

Probably just the clean install. Google restore seems to be causing issues for some people and a factory reset without restore can fix them.

after one hour?

How long should encryption take? Is it even working?!

Hi all,
Today I tried to encrypt my S5 (klte) running lineage-14.1-20170510-nightly-klte-signed. It has about 11GB used on the internal storage.
I was expecting to see the Android screen that tells me encryption is in progress, with a timer showing estimated completion time, but all I see it the usual LineageOS boot logo. I set this going more than 2 hours ago but it has not completed. The phone is warm, so I assume high CPU activity, and the logo is still animating, so I think it's doing *something*, but it's not what I expected to see.
Is something amiss or should I just be more patient?
Thanks,
Russ
PS I took a backup so I can restore if it doesn't work

OK, something was definitely not right, but it's all worked out OK: After 3+hours I gave up waiting and yanked the battery (it was unresponsive to power button). It then booted up fine, prompted me for password, and the phone is apparently now encrypted and all works as it should.
Worth reporting as a bug, do we think?
Russ

Why would you want it encrypted? Really.

西村大一 said:
Why would you want it encrypted? Really.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Any number of reasons, which aren't really relevant to the question about why a feature which *should* work doesn't do so as expected.

Encryption is marked as a bug in most custom roms and recoveries. And I king aget the gist of why you'd want it encrypted, but yeah, whatever floats your boat.