Enhancing multi‐tenancy security in the cloud computing using hybrid ECC‐based data encryption approach

Abstract

In this study, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is elected for tenant authentication, data encryption, and data decryption due to its minimum key size. The proposed ECC-based authentication approach allows the authorised person to access private data; it protects different related attacks effectively. To develop more secure data encryption, the authors have combined a nature-inspired optimisation, such as a moth search algorithm (MSA) with ECC, to select the correct and optimal value of the elliptic curve. The proposed encryption and decryption approach combines DNA encoding with the ECC encryption algorithm. The mechanism of DNA encoded ECC provided multi-level security with less computational power. The security analysis of the proposed method has been provided to prove its effectiveness against certain attacks, such as denial-of-service attack, impersonation attack, reply attack, plaintext attack and chosen-ciphertext attack. The experimental result is evaluated based on encryption time, decryption time, throughput and key size of the security model. The average execution time of the proposed encryption and decryption is only 83.153 and 86.076 s, respectively. From the evaluation, it is clearly determined that the proposed technique provides two-layer security with minimum key size and less storage space.