Secured Hybrid File Attribute Based Encryption Algorithm for Cloud Service Provider

Abstract

Maintaining data security in cloud is a great challenge because of the attack of outside intruders during data transmission. To secure the data, the Cloud Service Provider(CSP) uses escrow method where the public key and private key is generated by the Key Escrow Provider and backup of the secret keys was maintained by the Key Escrow Provider themselves for cloud data storage. Encrypting the whole content of the files having text is a time consuming and expensive task while using a third party cloud service provider. The various existing Encryption algorithm proposed to maintain security in key Escrow based encryption consume large memory storage and require more resources in mobile cloud storage. This research proposed a Hybrid File Attribute Based Encryption Algorithm (HFABE) which combines Key Escrow and standard encryption technique for data security. In this proposed method Encryption is done only on the file attributes (file name, file extension) regardless of the file content. The key verification module in the proposed algorithm uses the data owners and data users e-mail for sending and receiving the encryption keys to identify the authenticated data owner and data user. The proposed HFABE ensures data security for Educational Institutions which uses public cloud for data storage. Many algorithms already existing for data security concentrate mostly on encrypting the text data only but in this paper encryption is done for all type of files such as txt, doc, docx that is shared through cloud. The proposed algorithm gives better results and takes less time to encrypt and decrypt the data when compared with the already existing algorithms. The performance of the HFABE for encrypting and decrypting a file was compared with the existing DES and RSA algorithm and the results proved that the proposed algorithm provides better security in transferring the Educational Data.