Tradeoffs between performance and security of cryptographic primitives used in storage as a service for cloud computing

Abstract

Cloud computing is a novel pattern of computing where resources are provisioned on demand over the Internet. Being pay-as-you-go model, Cloud users lease the required resources and pay for their usage. Services offered by Cloud are broadly divided into three categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). IaaS provides computing resources such as servers, storage, and other form of low level network and hardware resources. One of the widely used services of Cloud viz. Storage as a Service, falls under IaaS. It provides online storage space to users to store their data. But due to lack of (physical) control over their data, users' worry about security and privacy is apparent. Cryptographic algorithms are evident answers to this problem. But while utilizing traditional cryptographic primitives for data stored on Cloud, issues such as computation cost of algorithm, level of security offered by them, sensitivity of data etc. need to be taken into considerations. This paper aims to address the tradeoffs between these issues and intends to provide guidelines to Cloud users about best security options based on significance of their data.