Securing Cloud from Data Misconfiguration using Cryptographic Techniques

The advent of cloud computing has made data accessible anytime, anywhere. The past few years have seen a boom in organisations migrating to cloud computing. How far are the companies successful in preserving data security and privacy? Cloud security vulnerabilities are on the rise making the cloud environment susceptible to malicious attacks. Among the many threats, cloud misconfiguration can prove very costly as it leads to data leakage and malicious attacks. The purpose of this study is to examine the various methods available to prevent cloud misconfiguration breaches with emphasis on security mitigation techniques for multi-cloud storage environments. Cloud computing is advancing and so is the need for sophisticated security measures to ensure data privacy and integrity. Therefore, traditional security strategies are insufficient to meet the security requirements and ensure safe cloud computing. The paper focuses on the various encryption techniques related to single and multi-cloud security. Research papers on encryption practices in different cloud deployment models have been surveyed. Homomorphic encryption techniques are found to ensure strong data security. In this paper, a hybrid model is proposed after conducting a comparative study of RSA, Paillier and their hybrid. The implementation of the combined approach using two different partial homomorphic encryptions aims at accomplishing a new encryption system that emulates an improvised fully homomorphic encryption. The proposed encryption can beat the large key size and computational complexity of fully homomorphic encryption. The comparative results show that the RSA-Paillier hybrid model ensures higher data security than RSA and Paillier algorithms.