This post was last Updated on July 19, 2023 by Himanshu Tyagi to reflect the accuracy and up-to-date information on the page.
In layperson’s terms, cloud computing is a platform that allows anyone to utilize IT resources, such as servers, databases, applications, etc., through an internet connection. A 3rd party, cloud services provider, maintains all these resources. Hence, providing companies the flexibility to add resources based on business requirements.
Cloud computing is an emerging trend, but many issues are related to data privacy and security. As the data travels to and fro from cloud servers to the company network, it is susceptible to hacking, just like any other internet service. Therefore, you must check out your cloud service provider’s data privacy and security architectures as a business.
A reputed cloud service provider implements various encryption algorithms to secure data transfer. This article will discuss multiple encryption algorithms for cloud data security and how they ensure safe and secure data transmission, making the cloud reliable for your organization.
Let’s first understand the benefits of cloud computing.
Benefits of Cloud computing
1. Cost reduction: The cloud allows you to reduce your IT bills as you don’t have to buy expensive hardware and staff a technical team to maintain those resources regularly.
2. Data Backup and recovery: Cloud stores your business data per your requirements, and you can quickly recover it if anything goes wrong. Cloud computing provides secure data storage, ensuring your business information is protected and readily recoverable in case of mishaps.
Automated backup processes reduce IT burdens, allowing more focus on strategic initiatives. Moreover, cloud solutions seamlessly integrate email archiving solutions, ensuring compliance and facilitating the eDiscovery process when required. Embrace cloud technology for data resilience and flexibility in today’s digital landscape.
3. Broad network access: Cloud services are location-agnostic through an open network that allows data access anytime and anywhere by various devices such as smartphones, laptops, etc.
4. Multi-sharing: The cloud works in a distributed and shared mode, allowing multiple users and applications to work more effectively by sharing a common infrastructure.
5. Collaboration: Cloud provides an easy way to work with a different group of people together for a significant project or application effectively.
6. Scalability: If the user business has experienced growth with Cloud storage, they need to extend the pay only for storage requirements.
Challenges of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing provides a wide range of benefits. On top of that, it has to tackle many problems that have to be analyzed. Data security is one of the significant challenges of cloud computing technology. Many doubts have been raised about secrecy, misuse of information, availability, etc.
Let’s see some security challenge that has to concern while adopting Cloud computing.
- Privacy of data
- Data breach
- Data loss
- Insecure access points
- Lack of visibility and control
- Transmission of data
- Data integrity
- Confidentiality of data.
What are the Cryptographic algorithms?
A cryptographic algorithm is a well-defined technique of converting data into an unreadable form that hides the data for unauthorized users. This algorithm is used to encrypt or decrypt the data. In general, there are three types of Cryptographic algorithms as follows.
- Symmetric key cryptography: It is a system where the sender and receiver have the same key to encrypt and decrypt messages.
- Asymmetric key cryptography: It is a system where a pair of keys are used, such as a Public key used to encrypt data for everyone, and a private key is used to decrypt data for the receiver alone.
- Hushing key: It is a value of plain text with a fixed length, making it impossible to recover the content. Many Operating systems use the hush key to encrypt the password.
The main components of Cryptosystems are as follows.
- Plain text: It is an original form of data that is used to protect during transmission
- Ciphertext: It is an unreadable form of text after encryption
- Encryption algorithm: It is a mathematical process used to convert plain text to ciphertext
- Decryption algorithm: It is used to convert ciphertext to plain text
- Encryption key: The key the sender uses for the Encryption algorithm process.
- Decryption key: It is a key the receiver uses for the Decryption process.
Encryption Algorithms for Cloud Security
Encryption algorithms play a vital role in tackling the problem of cloud security. It is a mathematical process used to convert plain text into ciphertext. It uses an algorithm to convert text into meaningless text, which is ciphertext, and a key is required to translate the text into meaningful text. Many algorithms used for cloud security are discussed further.
1. Data Encryption Standard (DES)
It is a symmetric key algorithm used for the encryption of digital data. It works with the same secret key for encrypting or decrypting data messages. In this process, the initial permutation rearranges the 64 bits of plain text that work in a predefined form.
DES implements the Feistel cipher that consists of 16 Feistel rounds. Each round uses the 48-bit round keys that apply to the plain text. These round keys generate sixteen 48-bit keys out of 56 cipher keys. It results in the output of a 64-bit ciphertext.
2. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)
It is a most adopted symmetric encryption that operates computation on bytes instead of bits, treating 128 bits of plain text as 16 bytes. These bytes are arranged as a matrix of four columns and four rows that operates data using permutation and substitution. The key specifies the number of transformation rounds used in the encryption process.
3. Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman (RSA)
It is an asymmetric algorithm using several data block sizes and keys. It has data encryption and decryption keys and two prime numbers to generate a public and private key. This algorithm secures communication and authentication on an open communication network.
4. Blowfish algorithm
A symmetric algorithm encrypts a 64-bit block with a variable key length of 32-448 bits at 16 rounds. It provides a reasonable encryption rate with no cryptanalysis techniques found to date. It is a significantly fast and secure cipher block not subject to any patent; thus, it is free for anyone.
5. Homomorphic algorithm
Encryption and encryption occur with the client and provider in this algorithm, which can be operated upon by encrypted data. It solves the problem of data threats while transferring the data between the client and service provider, it hides the plain text from the service provider, and the provider operates upon ciphertext only. It allows complex mathematical operations to protect the original data from the service provider.
Conclusion
In this article, we discussed five encryption algorithms for cloud data security. Encryption algorithm plays a vital role in securing the data using algorithm techniques. Data security is the most challenging issue in Cloud computing technology.
However, the Encryption algorithm has solved the problem of security. Among all the algorithms, the Homomorphic algorithm is the most suitable algorithm to secure the organization’s confidential data in an open network.
It performs operations on the encrypted data that enable high security compared to other security algorithms such as DES, AES, RSA, and Blowfish.
, Advanced Encryption Standard, etc.){kind=link}