Google today announced it made encryption in Chrome for Android faster and safer. The browser can now pick from several encryption algorithms when making a SSL connection. The new algorithms have the main purpose to speed up performance of SoCs that don't support hardware acceleration. Google is now using ChaCha20 for symmetric encryption and Poly1305 for authentication.
Google claims the ChaCha20 algorithm is safer because it's resistant against timing attacks. Besides that, both ChaCha20 and Poly1305 are optimized for ARM SoCs which speeds up encrypted browser connections and also consumes less energy.
Google is using the new algorithms since February this year but only when the Android Chrome browser connects to to one of its own services. Eventually the algorithms have to become part of Android, the code should be implemented in future versions of the mobile operating system.
