INTEGRATED ENCRYPTION FRAMEWORK FOR ENHANCED DATA SECURITY IN CLOUD STORAGE

In the contemporary era, there has been a consistent increase in the usage of cloud infrastructure to manage enterprise data. However, there have been security concerns from the data owners’ point of view, no matter how good the security of the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) is claimed. Security mechanisms based on cryptography, such as AES, DES, and RSA, have been serving information systems for safeguarding data from adversaries. Although they are effective at protecting data from malicious attacks, future-proof security mechanisms must also consider post-quantum threats. Many of the current studies predicted the possibility of post-quantum security vulnerabilities of existing cryptographic primitives. Motivated by the findings from the literature on the need for novel mechanisms to deal with security of cloud data in post-quantum era, we proposed a novel security framework known as Cloud Data Security Framework (CDSF) that has underlying mechanisms for encoding and decoding that are used to have stronger security when compared with traditional cryptographic primitives such as AES for cloud data encryption and decryption. Moreover, the framework achieves data security, data availability, and data integrity with its mechanisms used for encoding and decoding data. Data owners can use the proposed framework to have secure outsourcing of data and data retrieval even in the post-quantum era. The proposed framework is evaluated with an empirical study using Amazon EC2 cloud infrastructure and found to have better performance over the state-of-the-art cryptographic primitives like AES, DES, and RSA.