Efficient cloud storage confidentiality to ensure data security

Abstract

Cloud computing provides an enormous amount of virtual storage to the users. Cloud storage mainly helps to small and medium scale industries to reduce their investments and maintenance of storage servers. Cloud storage is efficient for data storage. Users' data are sent to the cloud is to be stored in the public cloud environment. Data stored in the cloud storage might mingle with other users' data. This will lead to the data protection issue in cloud storage. If the confidentiality of cloud data is broken, then it will cause loss of data to the industry. Security of cloud storage is ensured through confidentiality parameter. To ensure the confidentiality, the most common used technique is encryption. But encryption alone doesn't give maximum protection to the data in the cloud storage. To have efficient cloud storage confidentiality, this paper uses encryption and obfuscation as two different techniques to protect the data in the cloud storage. Encryption is the process of converting the readable text into unreadable form using an algorithm and a key. Obfuscation is same like encryption. Obfuscation is a process which disguises illegal users by implementing a particular mathematical function or using programming techniques. Based on the type of data, encryption and obfuscation can be applied. Encryption can be applied to alphabets and alphanumeric type of data and obfuscation can be applied to a numeric type of data. Applying encryption and obfuscation techniques on the cloud data will provide more protection against unauthorized usage. Confidentiality could be achieved with a combination of encryption and obfuscation.