Framework and Algorithms to Improve Security Mechanism in Cloud

Abstract

Hottest buzzword of this decade “Cloud Computing” - which has been considered as one of the potential solutions to our increasing demand for accessing, processing, storing and using provisioned resources over the internet. However with so many boons, it comes along with some curse as security and trust issues. There are many security issues within cloud like improper information disclosure and dissemination. So as to provide confidentiality to cloud users this work proposes an XML encryption technique. The encryption technique used is DNA encryption by using some interesting features of some DNA sequencing. It assures not to disclose the user’s confidential information. DNA encryption technique is compared with other encryption schemes in literature as with DES, AES and RSA. During the experiments of selectively encrypting an XML file, it was observed that encryption time as compared to AES, DES and RSA is significantly very low also in security point of view, the probability to decrypt a DNA encrypted text is also very low. Moreover a comparison is made between the average encryption time of selected text with the average encryption time of full content of file. During the experiments it was found that there lies a huge difference in average encryption between full and selective encryption average time, the difference was not merely in the time but was also that the difference of length of plaintext and cipher text. The cipher text after encryption is very large. Hence if we choose selective encryption then it not only maintains the confidentiality but also improves performance by saving encryption time and space used for encryption. In this work an XPath attack on XML file is also demonstrated and the experiments show that by encrypting the XML data and storing the data on XML in encrypted form can prevent the information discloser, hence provide the confidentiality to the user.