CloudJS: novel cloud-based design framework for text-file encryption

Abstract

Purpose Cloud computing is becoming increasingly popular as it facilitates convenient, ubiquitous, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources and applications that can be quickly retrieved and released. Despite its numerous merits, it faces setbacks in data security and privacy. Data encryption is one of the most popular solutions for data security in the cloud. Various encryption algorithms have been implemented to address security concerns. These algorithms have been reviewed along with the Jumbling Salting algorithm and its applications. The framework for using Jumbling Salting to encrypt text files in the cloud environment (CloudJS) has been thoroughly studied and improvised. The purpose of this paper is to implement the CloudJS algorithm, to discuss its performance and compare the obtained results with existing cloud encryption schemes. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses six research questions to analyze the performance of CloudJS algorithm in the cloud environment. The research questions are about measuring encryption time and throughput, decryption time and throughput, the ratio of cipher to the plain text of CloudJS algorithm with respect to other Cloud algorithms like AES and DES. For this purpose, the algorithm has been implemented using dockers-containers in the Linux environment. Findings It was found that CloudJS performs well in terms of encryption time, decryption time and throughput. It is marginally better than AES and undoubtedly better than DES in these parameters. The performance of the algorithm is not affected by a number of CPU cores, RAM size and Line size of text files. It performs decently well in all scenarios and all resultant values fall in the desired range. Research limitations/implications CloudJS can be tested with cloud simulation platforms (CloudSim) and cloud service providers (AWS, Google Cloud). It can also be tested with other file types. In the future, CloudJS algorithm can also be implemented in images and other files. Originality/value To the best of the knowledge, this is the first attempt to implement and analysis of a custom encryption algorithm (CloudJS) in the cloud environment using dockers-containers.