Just recently, the latest CyanogenMod nightly began supporting encryption on my phone, even though the bugreport still says it's an open issue. I don't mind. Anyway, this allowed me to finish a major project of mine: Protect the data on my phone, even in the case of a theft, while maintaining the ability to use the device conveniently.
The goal. I want a strong disk encryption password, but i want a weak screen password or PIN, because unlocking the device is a frequent task. In such a scenario, it makes sense to implement an account lockout policy: In other words, we want the phone to shut down after, say, 3 failed attempts to unlock the screen. This prevents the screen password from being brute forced.
Your device needs to be rooted to do everything I did. You will also need the Android studio if you want to do this properly, and it's a large download, you might as well start now. Click here if you're still interested.
So you want to have some more control over your android phone? Sure you do. For any, just slightly above userlevel stuff you might want to do with it, you require the tools ADB (the Android Developer Bridge) and Fastboot (Fastboot). Since I am still quite ignorant to all of this, I decided to write a small reminder blagpost for myself on how to get those tools. Oh yea, this is all on Windows. Linux users have package managers and stuff like this just works.
You will need the Java Development Kit. After you got that, you need to get the Android SDK Tools. Download "SDK Tools Only". Once you have installed it, open the SDK Manager. It will want to install a lot of stuff, but unless you actually want to do development, you might not even have to install anything. I installed the following only:
* Android SDK Tools
* Android SDK Platform-tools
* Google USB Drivers
Assuming that %GSDK% is the path where you installed the SDK tools, you will find the applications adb.exe and fastboot.exe in
%GSDK%\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools
You might want to add that to your path, or not. Fun fact. If you use cygwin, you can call adb shell from a cygwin terminal and then invoke bash on the phone, and the cygwin terminal will interpret all the color codes sent back from the phone's bash correctly, so you can have a really comfortable shell open on your phone:
MinTTY on LG G3 sporting CM12
