Google likes to make capital-A Alliances. Rather infamously so. But the latest one might actually mean something, as it's trying to gather software and hardware partners in cooperation for a lot of emerging security technologies, enabling hardware-based encryption for things like digital keys, secure documents, and wallets. Google is calling it the Android Ready SE Alliance.

In the announcement post, Google says that it's working with hardware partners to make devices with a Secure Element, a dedicated chip that handles hardware-level encryption and decryption. Google's own Titan M is a current example. But going forward, the goal is to make a solution that can be implemented broadly and with wide compatibility, in phones, tablets, wearables, cars, and even televisions.

Exactly how this will work gets pretty technical: lots of pre-boot verification and constant validated key exchanges between SE chips and applets. But Google's immediate goals as related to Android are to support digital car keys, like the latest iPhones and some BMWs, and more secure than Hyundai's Bluetooth/NFC key system. Google's also hoping to support digital ID cards, including certain national identification systems and the nascent mDL standard.

Google says it has "several Android OEMs" ready to add Android Ready SE to their devices, but doesn't actually list any by name. You can expect something to come out of this for the next Pixel release, though whether it makes it to the rest of the Android world will depend on a lot of different variables.