International Journal of Computer Engineering and Applications,

Volume XII, Issue VI, June 18, www.ijcea.com ISSN 2321-3469

SECURE FILE STORAGE IN CLOUD COMPUTING USING HYBRID

ENCRYPTION ALGORITHM
Mehul Batra1, Prayas Dixit2, Lalit Rawat3, Rohini Khalkar4
1,2,3,4 Department of Computer Engineering, Bharati Vidyapeeth (Deemed to be) University College of
Engineering Pune
1
mehulwittybatra@gmail.com, 2prayas95.dixit@gmail.com, 3lalit.rawat203@gmail.com
4
rohini.khalkar@bharatividyapeeth.edu

ABSTRACT
Data transmitted through internet is getting larger every day .Therefore an algorithm is required
by which our data can be transferred speedily and securely. The main aim of this particular
research is to protect the transmitted data with the help of encryption and decryption techniques.
This research paper presents a model for encrypting the data transmitted through cloud. The
algorithms used in this model are: AES, DES, RC4 and Steganography. This hybrid algorithm
will help users and cloud service provider to transmit their data without being stolen or affected.

Keywords - Cloud Security, Cloud computing, Hybrid Encryption, AES, DES, RC4,
Steganography

[1] INTRODUCTION
Cloud computing is a term used for providing services over the internet. Basically
it is a technique which is used to store, process and manage data over the remote servers
and network. Services are divided into three categories: Infrastructure as a service (IaaS),
Software as a service (SaaS) and Platform as a service (PaaS).
Data Integrity in cloud storage:

As a ground-breaking technology with earnest implications, cloud computing is

transforming the whole business and information technology sectors. Cloud computing has many

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 SECURE FILE STORAGE IN CLOUD COMPUTING USING HYBRID ENCRYPTION ALGORITHM

benefits such as: mobility, backup and recovery, universal data access with independent
geographical locations.

The consistency, accuracy, validity and precision of remotely stored data are called data
integrity and it is a fundamental component of information security.

Cloud Computing makes these advantages more alluring than ever, some challenging
security threats towards the user’s outsourced data is it’s side effects. One of the biggest concerns
with cloud storage is of data integrity verification at unknown servers. For example, the service
provider (storage), which experiences tortuous failure occasionally, may decide to hide the data
errors from the clients for the benefit of their own.

Cloud Service Providers (CSP) needs to convince their clients that their data has remained
unaltered and it is kept safe from corruption, remoulding or unauthorized disclosure by using these
techniques.

ENCRYPTION

One of the most prime method for providing data security, especially for end-to-end
transmission of data over the networks. Encryption is the method by which a data or plain text is
transformed to an encoded form that can only be decoded by one who has the key. The data which
is unencrypted is called plain text and the data which is encrypted is referred as cipher text. There
are two main types of encryption asymmetric and symmetric encryption.

ALGORITHMS

a) RC4

RC4 is a shared key stream algorithm requires a unassailable exchange of shared key. In
this algorithm stream of random characters is fully unconventional of plain text used. An 8*8 S-
Box in which each of the entries is a permutation of the numbers from 0 to 255 and permutation is
method of the mutable length key. The two counters I and j are both set to zero in this algorithm.
Mostly used for successive generation of pseudo arbitrary bytes and after that generates a random
stream which is a XORED with the plaintext to provide the cipher text.

Figure 1. RC4 working flow

Mehul Batra, Prayas Dixit, Lalit Rawat, Rohini Khalkar 31

 International Journal of Computer Engineering and Applications,
Volume XII, Issue VI, June 18, www.ijcea.com ISSN 2321-3469

b) AES

Popular and widely used symmetric encryption algorithm “Advanced Encryption

Standard”. It is six times rapid than DES. It is considered as a replacement of DES because key
size of DES was too small. It is a iterative approach based on substitution-permutation network. It
is made of series of linked operations, which involves substituting inputs with specific outputs and
others involve mixing bits around. It basically computes on bytes rather than bits. AES considers
the 128 bits of plain text block as 16 bytes. These 16 bytes are arranged in 4 attributes and 4 tuples
for processing as a matrix. Number of rounds in AES is mutable and changes with respect to the
length of the key. For example: For 128 bit keys AES uses 10 rounds , 12 for 192 bit keys and 14
rounds for 256 bit keys.

Figure 2. workflow of AES

c) DES

A symmetric key block cipher DES(Data Encryption Standard) based on Feistel Cipher.
Works on 16 round Fiestel Structure and with a block size of 64 bit. It has a effective key length of
56 bits. As 8 of the 64 bits of the key are not used by the algorithm(8 of those bits are used for
parity checks). It can run in four different modes by encrypting blocks individually or by making
cipher block dependent on previous blocks. But it is very easy to crack the key with the brute force
which involves trying every possible key until you find the right one and maximum it would take
2^56. So company came with the successor to DES which is 3DES IN which we perform three
iterations of the DES algorithm to increase key length from 56 bit to 168 bits but it’s comparatively
slower than DES.

Figure 3. workflow of DES

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 SECURE FILE STORAGE IN CLOUD COMPUTING USING HYBRID ENCRYPTION ALGORITHM

d) STEGANOGRAPHY

Steganography is a process in which the secret message is written in something in this

manner that no one other than the sender and intended recipient has doubts about the existence of
the message, which is a security through uncertainty. Steganography (secret writing). In this
messages are present in different way:

images, articles or some other co-text and, ideally, secret messages, are in invisible ink
between visual lines of a private letter. The advantage of steganography compared to cryptography
is that the message does not draw attention to itself. Clearly visible encrypted messages - no matter
how unobtrusive - will create suspicion and trap themselves in countries where encryption is
illegal. Therefore, cryptography where the data is protected, steganography The data and the
communicating party can both be defended.

Figure 4. working Architecture of Steganography

ISSUES IN CLOUD SECURITY

Even with various benefits of cloud computing users and consumers are unwilling to adopt
this technology. Security is a broad topic in cloud computing. It has basically two broad categories
i.e security issues faced by cloud users and issues faced by cloud providers. Therefore, there are
new requirements for security in cloud compared to traditional environments.

[2] APPLICATION OF CLOUD SECURITY

We often use snapchat, Instagram, google drive bottom line is, if we use any social
networking program or data storage we are almost using cloud computing. we also use cloud
services such as email offloading that helps a lot in reducing the companies cost of development
and maintenance despite the immense benefits of the cloud computing the privacy of the data is the
biggest concern of the organizations and individual users have. current technologies used to protect
the data include firewalls, a technology developed by IBM called airavat. In a research project, we
are leading our aim is to provide cloud data security and privacy protection. Although cloud
computing has many advantages there are still many problems that need to be solved and in our
research project we have created a suite of algorithms for scalable control and computation of
encrypted data in the cloud. This will go to help the cloud providers to control and manage the
physical infrastructure and make sure the data on the cloud remains secure. There can be data
vulnerabilities the susceptible to attackers looking to exploit and attack the data to gain complete
control over it or steal it but our hybrid encryption will help in getting over it.

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 International Journal of Computer Engineering and Applications,
Volume XII, Issue VI, June 18, www.ijcea.com ISSN 2321-3469

[3] PROPOSED MODEL

Proposed System works on Hybrid encryption which is comprised of four encryption

algorithms .basically the concept of hybrid encryption is to mix the different encryption algorithm
for making cloud robust and to secure the data or privacy. The mere introduction of the algorithms
used in hybrid encryption. first one to come is RC4 is a shared key stream algorithm requires a
unassailable exchange of shared key . In this algorithm stream of random characters is fully
unconventional of plain text used. An 8*8 S-Box in which each of the entries is a permutation of
the numbers from 0 to 255 and permutation is method of the mutable length key. Then comes the
DES a symmetric key block cipher DES (Data Encryption Standard) based on Feistel Cipher.
Works on 16 round Fiestel Structure and with a block size of 64 bit. It has a effective key length of
56 bits. As 8 of the 64 bits of the key are not used by the algorithm (8 of those bits are used for
parity checks). Third one is the successor of the DES Popular and widely used symmetric
encryption algorithm “Advanced Encryption Standard”. It is six times rapid than DES. It is
considered as a replacement of DES because key size of DES was too small. It is a iterative
approach based on substitution-permutation network. It is made of series of linked operations,
which involves substituting inputs with specific outputs and others involve mixing bits around. It
basically computes on bytes rather than bits. AES considers the 128 bits of plain text block as 16
bytes. Last one is Steganography which will be used to hide key it is a process in which the secret
message is written in something in this manner that no one other than the sender and intended
recipient has doubts about the existence of the message, which is a security through uncertainty.
Steganography (secret writing). The text file will be taken as an input that text file will be divided
into three equal parts first half of the text will be encrypted with the help of RC4 . the second half
of the text will be encrypted with the help of the AES and the remaining text will be encrypted
with the DES . The key produced will hide in some image with the help of the steganography (It is
a simple approach to hide message or key into the image with the help of the LSB). The encrypted
file and the hidden key to decrypt the file will be sent to the user. User has to first decrypt the
image to get to know the key and then that key will be used to decrypt the secured file. This
technique will help to maintain the confidentiality and Authentication of the User and will help to
gain the access control. That key further will be used to decrypt the data for the authorized user.
For decryption of file the reverse process of encryption is applied shown in figure 6.

Figure 5. Architecture of hybrid encryption

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 SECURE FILE STORAGE IN CLOUD COMPUTING USING HYBRID ENCRYPTION ALGORITHM

Figure 6. Architecture of hybrid decryption

[3] RESULT

In this proposed model of RC4, AES, DES and Steganography algorithms are used for
securing the data. Proposed system is a collection RC4, AES, DES, and Steganography. All these
algorithms are symmetric key encryption algorithm. These algorithms uses the 128 bit key size and
to hide the data into image using LSB technique. The encoding and the decoding time of the
encryption is calculated with the help of the java program. All the operations will be performed on
the single text file which will be further divided into the three parts.

Figure 7. Encryption time with AES and proposed system

As shown in figure 7 proposed system need less time for file encoding. It is so because in proposed
model combination of symmetric key encryption algorithms are run concurrently. Hybrid
algorithm needs 18% to 20% less time for text file in comparison with the existing technologies.
With single algorithm u cannot provide high security to cloud data.

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 International Journal of Computer Engineering and Applications,
Volume XII, Issue VI, June 18, www.ijcea.com ISSN 2321-3469

Figure 8. Decryption time with AES and proposed system

As shown in figure 8 current system require 14% to 16% maximum time for decryption of file
compared to hybrid algorithm . AES algorithm takes less time for decryption but doesn’t provide
good security to data . As in AES if size of key increases then directly the number of rounds
increases than encoding and decoding time also increases.

[4] CONCLUSION

Issues of cloud storage are solved using encryption and steganography techniques. Data
security is achieved using RC4, AES, DES and key security is accomplished using the LSB
technique. Delay is kept low using multithreading technique with the help of this security
technique data integrity, confidentiality, authentication is achieved. While the proposed text file
encryption takes 17% to 20% less time than AES and even more less than DES and RC4. So
finally the proposed solution will help the users to overcome the fraudulence and will help in
secure transmission of data.

REFERENCES

[1] Dr. S.H Patil and Rohini Khalkar, “Data Security Technique In Cloud Storage”, International
Journal of Computer Engineering and Technology, vol. 4, Issue. 2, pp:373-375, June 2013.

[2] Rohini Khalkar and Dr. S.H Patil, “Data Integrity Proof Techniques In Cloud Storage”,
International Journal of Computer Engineering and Technology, vol. 4, Issue.2, pp:454-458, April 2013.

[3] V.S. Mahalle and A. K. Shahade, “Enhancing the Data Security in Cloud by Implementing Hybrid
(Rsa & Aes) Encryption Algorithm”, IEEE , INPAC,pp 146-149,Oct. 2014.

[4] P. S. Bhendwade and R. T. Patil, “Steganographic Secure Data Communication”,IEEE,

International Conference on Communication and Signal Processing, pages 953-956,April 2014.

Mehul Batra, Prayas Dixit, Lalit Rawat, Rohini Khalkar 36