Recently, the new full-disk encryption system of Apple's iOS 8 operating system has been [in the news](http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/apple-will-no-longer-unlock-most-iphones-ipads-for-police-even-with-search-warrants/2014/09/17/2612af58-3ed2-11e4-b03f-de718edeb92f_story.html). And soon after Apple's release, [Google announced](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/09/18/newest-androids-will-join-iphones-in-offering-default-encryption-blocking-police/) that they will also enable encryption by default in the upcoming version of their Android operating system.

My question is: From the security perspective, are the two systems similar or different (assuming you use the same password or PIN code)? Precisely how does Android's encryption work under the hood?

In more concrete terms: If I use a random 8-lowercase-letter password, which supposedly takes approx. 265 years to brute-force in the case of iOS devices, how safe am I with a similar setup on an Android phone?

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For background on the approach that Apple took with iOS 8, see [this document](https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1302613/ios-security-guide-sept-2014.pdf). If I understood this right, the key point seems to be that there is a special piece of tamper-proof hardware that contains a device-specific secret identifier. Supposedly, the only way to retrieve the encryption key is to feed your pin code to this piece of hardware, wait for 80ms, and see what comes out. To brute-force this, you will either have to keep entering PIN codes to this single unique piece of hardware (and each attempt takes 80ms, and you cannot parallelise this, as there is just one such chip in the world), or you will have to also brute-force the identifier (which is very long).

How does this compare to what Google (and Android phone manufacturers) are doing with Android phones?