Parallel Implementation of RC4 Data Encryption Method for Cloud Computing

Abstract

Cloud computing is an on-demand availability of computing resources. The current cloud computing environment uses different algorithms for its security; RC4 is one of them. However, due to the serial implementation of RC4 over cloud computing, the process of encryption and data transmission is badly affected by the factors of poor latency. This research is proposed to cover this factor by implementing a parallel RC4 algorithm in a cloud computing environment. The parallel RC4 model has been developed in web-based architecture relevant to the cloud computing environment. The method processed data simultaneously in four parallel pipelines encrypted through the RC4 algorithm. The proposed method used RC4 algorithms’ parallel implementation to encrypt and decrypt the data. The proposed method increases the efficiency of data encryption and decryption and transmission over a cloud environment using four pipelines at once. These four pipelines receive data and encrypt them using a key and then merge those four streams into a single cipher. These four pipelines enhance the speed of communication over cloud and solve the latency issue majorly. Data sending from node devices to cloud servers is divided into four equal streams and then encrypted using RC4 distinctly but parallel. Then after the roaming, the data are again first combined and then decrypted using the RC4 algorithm. The sample data sets are evaluated on the criteria of the starting time and ending time of the encryption and decryption of data. Results show that the proposed method is able to enhance the speed of the whole process up to average 3.7% due to the implementation of parallel technique and had reduced the time notably. The future work on this research involves enhancement of security process of RC4 algorithm since it can be breached easily.