An Enhanced Encryption Scheme for Cloud Security

Cloud computing is a technique that connects a large number of systems with either public or private network, providing dynamic scalability for data storage, building applications, and other services. The consumers are charged only for the resources they consume. Cloud computing provides enormous applications and benefits in the IT field, but all the facilities need to be completely secured and protected. Removing security risks and maintaining privacy are essential for securing cloud computing. Several encryption algorithms are used for encrypting data in the cloud. Homomorphic encryption is an advantageous technique in cloud computing because it allows the cloud service providers to work on encrypted data. Thus, it ensures the privacy of sensitive data and denies access to data by cloud providers. Nevertheless, this homomorphic encryption technique has a problem with key sharing and management. Hence, to provide efficient key management, the technique of particle swarm optimization is used along with homomorphic encryption. Data to be encrypted is taken as input and treated as the initial population. PSO generates the key for encryption; then, the data is encrypted using homomorphic encryption. We have used MATLAB to implement this proposed encryption algorithm. Performance is analyzed on the basis of the time taken to execute and the utilization of resources. The observations made suggest that the enhanced algorithm executes well and provides better results as compared to the existing algorithm. It shows less time taken to execute and requirement of less number of resources. Hence, the proposed scheme ensures cloud security efficiently.