Ensuring confidentiality and privacy of cloud data using a non-deterministic cryptographic scheme

Abstract

The amount of data generated by electronic systems through e-commerce, social networks, and data computation has risen. However, the security of data has always been a challenge. The problem is not with the quantity of data but how to secure the data by ensuring its confidentiality and privacy. Though there are several research on cloud data security, this study proposes a security scheme with the lowest execution time. The approach employs a non-linear time complexity to achieve data confidentiality and privacy. A symmetric algorithm dubbed the Non-Deterministic Cryptographic Scheme (NCS) is proposed to address the increased execution time of existing cryptographic schemes. NCS has linear time complexity with a low and unpredicted trend of execution times. It achieves confidentiality and privacy of data on the cloud by converting the plaintext into Ciphertext with a small number of iterations thereby decreasing the execution time but with high security. The algorithm is based on Good Prime Numbers, Linear Congruential Generator (LGC), Sliding Window Algorithm (SWA), and XOR gate. For the implementation in C#, thirty different execution times were performed and their average was taken. A comparative analysis of the NCS was performed against AES, DES, and RSA algorithms based on key sizes of 128kb, 256kb, and 512kb using the dataset from Kaggle. The results showed the proposed NCS execution times were lower in comparison to AES, which had better execution time than DES with RSA having the longest. Contrary, to existing knowledge that execution time is relative to data size, the results obtained from the experiment indicated otherwise for the proposed NCS algorithm. With data sizes of 128kb, 256kb, and 512kb, the execution times in milliseconds were 38, 711, and 378 respectively. This validates the NCS as a Non-Deterministic Cryptographic Algorithm. The study findings hence are in support of the argument that data size does not determine the execution time of a cryptographic algorithm but rather the size of the security key.