Analysis and Optimization of Privacy-Preserving Encryption Techniques in Cloud Computing Environments for Secure Cloud Data

The cloud services industry has a significant problem in guaranteeing the safety of cloud computing. An effective encryption solution that has little to no effect on performance is necessary when working with data in the cloud, which makes use of shared resources, and when offering trustworthy and secure cloud services. With the rapid expansion of cloud computing, ensuring data privacy and security remains a critical challenge. This research develops an encryption framework that combines AES and SHA-3 to boost security performance during cloud data protection procedures. Security and unauthorized access risks get minimized by implementing asymmetric SHA-3 to encrypt AES keys in the proposed method. The evaluation considers encryption time, execution time, and decryption time using CloudSim 4.0 and Java-based implementations on a simulated cloud environment. The experimental data shows that AES encrypts data in 0.123s execution time but decrypts files in 0.118 s while SHA-3 requires 0.789s to encrypt and 4.25s to execute. Nonetheless, SHA-3 facilitates instantaneous file decryption. The proposed technique demonstrates efficient security operation through a comparison against RSA and Blowfish which shows its capacity to maintain security while reducing processing costs. Hybrid cryptographic methods strengthen data protection capabilities and maintain system operational speed which makes them appropriate for cloud-based confidentiality-sensitive applications.