Enhanced security for cloud using dual encryption and compression

Abstract

newline The enduring growth of Wireless communication paved the new way to access files newlinein an easy manner by proper authentication between systems. The systems that rely newlineon such communication must be efficient in processing capabilities as well as storage newlinecapacities. The increase in such processing and storage capacities will increase the newlinecost of the system. Hence, cloud based operations have emerged, wherein the newlineapplications that are accessed remotely are deployed on the server. The problem of newlineaccessing the applications by unauthorized users will create a havoc on the systems newlineperformance as these users will be continuously using the resources. Interestingly, newlinehackers also will be using such resources which is unknown to the actual users and newlinefeel the system to be slow in accessing the server. This has motivated the newlinerequirement of cloud secruity to be barred from the use of unauthenticated access. newlineThis thesis mainly concentrates on improving the cloud security by applying double newlineencryption technique and double compression methods such that the performance of newlinethe system can be improved. Initially, compression schemes were implemented such newlinethat files are transmitted from client to server in a faster manner. The use of Huffman newlinecoding has resulted in reduction of file size by 56% and 42% on an average by the newlineuse of arithmetic coding for different file sizes. When bit lengths are kept constant, newlineboth the Huffman and Arithmetic techniques result in equivalent file size reductions newlinefor text files of moderate size. Huffman coding provides a higher level of entropy newlineand coding efficiency than arithmetic coding when dealing with large text files. In newlineterms of encryption time, Huffman has outperformed artithmetic coding. newlineTo improve the efficiency of the system in terms of compression time, encryption newlinetime and encypted size of the file that is being save to the cloud storage, the use of newlineix newlineLZMA is proposed for compressing the file before applying encryption using AES. newlineThe compression ratio is reported to improve by an average of 2-10% depending on newlinethe file type when the proposed framework is used when compared to Huffman. The newlinecompressed file is now encrypted using AES. The encryption keys are further newlineencrypted using RSA, which adds another layer of protection to the data saved in the newlinecloud. The proposed system is simulated using AWS cloud services on a standalone newlinesystem with Linux Mint 19, 4 GB RAM. Different types of media viz., word, text, newlineimage, pdf are considered for experimentations. newlineThe compressed file size is observed to be less, when LZMA compression is used. newlineBut, the problem of compression timing still exist. Hence, to reduce the compression newlinetime on the client side, it is proposed to use Zstandard on the client side to improve newlinethe speed of processing. In comparison to the LZMA-based approach, the Zstandard newlinebased compression scheme achieved compression in 94.78 percent less time. As the newlinefiles are transmitted fast to the server, this prevents unauthorised users from newlineaccessing them. On the server side, the files are decompressed and subsequently newlinecompressed using LZMA. The adoption of LZMA is supported by the fact that the newlinecompressed file size is smaller than that of Zstandard. After compressing the file newlinewith LZMA, it is encrypted using AES and the keys used in AES are further newlineencrypted using RSA. Further, simulations are conducted by processing attacks viz., newlineBrute Force and DDoS on the system that is developed. It is observed that the system newlineis hackproof and the key can be cracked only after 2.32 x 1056 years by scaling the newlinesystem with the supercomputer capabilities. As a result, it can be inferred that the newlinesuggested double compression in conjunction with double encryption results in newlineimproved security.