Data Security Enhancement in Public Cloud Storage Using Data Obfuscation and Steganography

Abstract

Data storage security is a highest concern in the cloud storage. Cloud offers huge amount of space to store their user data. This technology has proved itself as a new venture because of its ability for releasing massive computational storage with reducing cost from anywhere to any user at any time. User outsources their data to the cloud for flexible, efficient and seamless services. Once the data is sent to the cloud, the cloud service provider (CSP) alone is responsible for the data. Apart from the benefits, it has lot of security issues on the data stored in the cloud. When a user outsources the data to the cloud, there is possibility to attack the data at rest as well as data in transit. Now the concern is how to secure the data and rely on the services in cloud. In order to protect the data from unauthorized access, data should be in either encrypted format or masked format. Data security is one of the major issues which acts as an obstacle in the adoption of cloud computing. This paper proposes an elegant and novel method to enhance the security of data by associating obfuscation technique along with steganography. The proposed confidentiality technique that combines the obfuscation and steganography techniques. The main principal of obfuscation is that transforms data into new form and it must conceal the original data while the steganography hides the existence of information. The obfuscated text can be hidden in image by using Least Significant Bit(LSB) substitution method. The experimental results prove that the proposed technique has high embedding capacity and high quality stego images.