An Elliptic Curve Cryptography Based Encryption Scheme for Securing the Cloud against Eavesdropping Attacks

Abstract

Cloud computing has recently become an extremely useful facet of modern distributed systems. Some of its many applications lie in the development of web services, its federation with the Internet of Things (IoT) and services for users in the form of storage, computing and networking facilities. However, as more services start utilizing the Cloud as a viable option, security concerns regarding user data and privacy also need to be tackled. In this paper, a security scheme for preventing eavesdropping attacks in Cloud environments is proposed. The encryption scheme is based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography and is specifically tailored for securing Cloud services providing storage facilities. As it is based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography, subsequent results obtained show that it reduces the computational overhead incurred in the encryption of data. The performances of other traditional security schemes such as RSA are also compared with the proposed encryption scheme. It is observed that the proposed scheme outperforms the other schemes in terms of the chosen performance characteristics.