Cloud-Light: Enhancing Cyber Security with a Lightweight Cryptographic Algorithm for Cloud Environments

As cloud computing becomes increasingly integral to modern business operations, ensuring robust cyber security has become essential. Traditional cryptographic algorithms, while secure, often impose significant computational overhead, making them less suitable for the dynamic and resource-constrained cloud environment. This paper introduces Cloud-Light, a novel lightweight cryptographic algorithm specifically designed to enhance cyber security in cloud environments. Cloud-Light aims to provide strong protection against various cyber threats while minimizing computational resource consumption. The algorithm features a block cipher structure with a smaller block size, an optimized Substitution-Permutation Network (SPN), a simplified yet secure key schedule, reduced round functions, and support for flexible key sizes. Rigorous security analyses demonstrate Cloud-Light's resistance to brute force, cryptanalysis, and side-channel attacks. Performance evaluations indicate significant improvements in encryption/decryption speed, lower CPU and memory usage, and scalability for large datasets. Cloud-Light offers a balanced approach to achieving both security and efficiency in cloud computing, presenting a promising solution for enhancing cyber security in modern cloud environments. Future work will focus on further optimizing Cloud-Light for specific applications, including Internet of Things (IoT) devices and other.