Enhancing Data Security in Cloud Storage Using Residue Number System and Advanced Encryption Standard
[Thesis]
Akogun, Damilare Nimat
Gbolagade, Kazeem A.
Kwara State University (Nigeria)
2020
109
M.S.
Kwara State University (Nigeria)
2020
Cloud computing is a technology by internet, where a large amount of data being pooled by different users is stored. It provides users with a range of services and is highly cost-effective and versatile. The data being stored comes from various organizations, individuals, and communities etc. Thus, security and privacy of data is of utmost importance to all of its users regardless of the nature of the data being stored. Cloud storage security concerns have shown to be the biggest challenge that could impact its large benefits. Data security is a major issue in cloud computing environment; this is becoming a serious problem because the data is stored in a variety of ways over the cloud. The present methods used for encrypting the files in cloud are not highly efficient. The use of multiple encryption technique gives the importance of data security, privacy protection, nature of attacks and other issues that may corrupt the data. Therefore, it is essential to apply effective encryption methods to increase data security. This research presents an enhanced data security in cloud storage with the use of multilevel cryptography so as to protect the confidentiality and privacy of data. The multilevel cryptography utilizes Residue Number System (RNS) and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256). It focuses on storing data in the cloud in an encrypted format to avoid data contact from an unauthorized access. The principle of cryptography in RNS was introduced so as to enhance the security of data stored on the cloud. American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) table was used to generate the decimal numbers of text data, RNS was used for the forward and reverse conversions with the moduli set {2n, 22n-1, 22n+1}. AES-256 algorithm was also used to attain high level of security. The system was deployed on Heroku cloud platform and its performance is evaluated in reference with encryption time, decryption time, encryption throughput and security level. Other metrics used to compare the developed approach with existing algorithms and multilevel approaches are key length, cryptographic strength and possibility of attacks. The experimental results show the efficacy of the system as the security level of the approach is higher than other existing approaches. Also, the multilevel approach (RNS-AES) utilized only less time for encryption of data and showed that as the file size increases, the throughput also increases which gives a higher throughput.