Towards improving data security and availability in cloud storage

Abstract

In the world of information communication cloud computing plays a major role Cloud computing offers a number of services to the users Infrastructure is one of the services that has been offered by cloud computing to its users and cloud storage has been one of the services offered through the infrastructure service The usage of cloud storage has increased in a rapid fashion across all kinds of applications Though cloud storage has been used widely there are two primary concerns the user has when using the cloud storage The two primary concerns are data security and data availability This thesis analyzes these two issues and proposes solutions to them Securing the user data has been a major issue with the cloud storage as the data gets stored in a remote place Researchers have worked towards securing the data by using traditional encryption algorithms The first part of the thesis proposes models that enhances the traditional encryption techniques Elliptic curve cryptography has been used to encrypt the user data and along with encryption data obfuscation is encapsulated Both these together increase the security parameter Another widely used encryption algorithm has been the Advanced Encryption Standard AES algorithm This algorithm has been studied and an improvement has been proposed by modifying one of its stages The proposed model has been verified using avalanche effect and Hamming distance The proposed model has a significant level of avalanche effect of 52 and the Hamming distance between the plaintext and the cipher text is found to vary between 0 75 and 1 It has been observed that this modification yields an improved secure storage for the user data Though traditional algorithms provide a good security measure there are certain limitations to its usage To overcome these the next section of this thesis proposes security models that make use of light weight techniques newline