Hybrid two-tier framework for improved security in cloud environment

Abstract

Cloud computing has already grabbed its roots in IT industry. It has become an appealing choice for small budget organizations since on demand resources are available on pay as you use basis. However, security of data being stored at cloud servers is still a big question for organizations in today's digital era where information is money. Large organizations are reluctant to switch to cloud services since they have threat of their data being maltreated. Cloud service provider's claim of providing robust security mechanism being maintained by third party, but still there are many reported incidents of security breach in cloud environment in past few years. Thus there is need of robust security mechanism to be adopted by cloud service providers in order for excelling cloud computing. This work proposes a hybrid two-tier agent based framework which deploys symmetric and asymmetric key algorithms in combination to provide robust security to user data. Further, this mechanism provides data decryption control to user only, thereby eliminating threat of data being misused by cloud service provider. Both cryptography algorithms being used in this work, have proved excellence for small key size, small encryption time and high speed, thus this framework would increase security without affecting processing speed of virtual machine.