An Evaluation on Securing Cloud Systems based on Cryptographic Key Algorithms

Abstract

The need for storage and movement of data in today's ever increasing data usage cannot be overemphasized. As a result, storage and movement of data within the cloud becomes a viable option, even though this is a third party and some of the data may be sensitive. Therefore, the security methods in place have to continually be reviewed so as to get the best method or a combination of methods in this ever changing and demanding field. In this paper, the authors have done a formal assessment and examination of cloud systems key cryptographic algorithms and given a recommendation of the best combination of algorithms as a result of our different parameters of considerations. These parameters include whether they are a stream or block cipher and their key size or the hash value. The authors found out that the most viable cryptographic methods for securing the cloud systems are AES, Blowfish, Diffie-Hellman, RSA and SHA-1 which are from symmetric, asymmetric and hashing cryptographic algorithm. They further noted that a hybrid of the three cryptographic algorithms is more effective than an exclusive use of one cryptographic algorithm. They propose a combination of AES, Diffie-Hellman and SHA-1 algorithm for optimum cloud security.