A Study on Light-Weight Cryptographic Methods Providing High Data Security in Cloud

Abstract

With the emergence of cloud computing, organizations changed their strategy in data storage and computations. Instead of investing on the computing resources, they prefer outsourcing their data to cloud. However, they are concerned about data security in the untrusted area. Thus data security in cloud has become an important research area due to its wide usage and the sources from which it is generated. Traditional cryptographic methods like RSA are heavy weight and not desirable for protecting data in the wake of quantum computers. Therefore, it is essential to explore cryptographic primitives that are lightweight yet provide stronger security. Data is often outsourced to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) layer of public cloud. There is need for protecting the data when it is at rest, when it is in transit and also when it is being processed in distributed environments. In this paper, we reviewed the present state of the art pertaining to data security and particularly focused on lightweight security primitives. It provides useful insights on different aspects of data security including methods used to secure data, lightweight cryptographic methods, hash based methods, hybrid approaches. It also provides research gap found the existing cryptographic methods used for data security in cloud computing.