Comparative study on encryption algorithms in cloud environment

Cloud computing is the Internet based development and used in computer technology where end users are provided with on demand shared resources, software and information. Security is being a major issue in the cloud computing, and it arise attention for Cloud Service Providers (CSP) and end users. Cloud computing security problem raises suspicions and makes many organizations refuse the idea of using the cloud in storing certain data within the cloud computing, especially data with high confidentiality. In addition, cloud users try to avoid being controlled by the CSPs. To avoid the data and data transmission from attackers, appropriate key management is necessary. Besides that, all the data is virtual and cloud is an open service and using a public network such as the Internet for application and services, which has security issues like authentication data loss. Encryption algorithm is a technique that is used to make data on the cloud secured. The aim of the study is to propose the authentication model using Kerberos technique for cloud environment to provides more security. This model can benefit by filtering the unauthorized access and also to reduce the memory usage of cloud provider against authentication checks for each user. It also acts as the third party between cloud server and users to allow authorized access to the cloud services. In this research, the performance of the algorithm is measured based on the computational and communication time. The performance is compared with three algorithms which are RSA, DSA and AES. Result experiment shows that RSA is performing much better than DSA and AES in terms of computational time

Improving the Authentication Mechanism of Business to Consumer (B2C) Platform in a Cloud Computing Environment: Preliminary Findings

The reliance of e-commerce infrastructure on cloud computing environment has undoubtedly increased the security challenges in web-based e-commerce portals. This has necessitated the need for a built-in security feature, essentially to improve the authentication mechanism, during the execution of its dependent transactions. Comparative analysis of the existing works and studies on XML-based authentication and non-XML signaturebased security mechanisms for authentication in Business to Consumer (B2C) e-commerce showed the advantage of using XML-based authentication, and its inherent weaknesses and limitations. It is against this background that this study, based on review and meta-analysis of previous works, proposes an improved XML digital signature with RSA algorithm, as a novel algorithmic framework that improves the authentication strength of XML digital signature in the B2C e-commerce in a cloud-based environment. Our future works include testing and validation, and simulation, of the proposed authentication framework in Cisco’s XML Management Interface with inbuilt feature of NETCONF. The evaluation will be done in conformity to international standard and guideline –such as W3C and NIST

Vulnerability Assessment and Privacy-preserving Computations in Smart Grid

Modern advances in sensor, computing, and communication technologies enable various smart grid applications which highlight the vulnerability that requires novel approaches to the field of cybersecurity. While substantial numbers of technologies have been adopted to protect cyber attacks in smart grid, there lacks a comprehensive review of the implementations, impacts, and solutions of cyber attacks specific to the smart grid.In this dissertation, we are motivated to evaluate the security requirements for the smart grid which include three main properties: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. First, we review the cyber-physical security of the synchrophasor network, which highlights all three aspects of security issues. Taking the synchrophasor network as an example, we give an overview of how to attack a smart grid network. We test three types of attacks and show the impact of each attack consisting of denial-of-service attack, sniffing attack, and false data injection attack.Next, we discuss how to protect against each attack. For protecting availability, we examine possible defense strategies for the associated vulnerabilities.For protecting data integrity, a small-scale prototype of secure synchrophasor network is presented with different cryptosystems. Besides, a deep learning based time-series anomaly detector is proposed to detect injected measurement. Our approach observes both data measurements and network traffic features to jointly learn system states and can detect attacks when state vector estimator fails.For protecting data confidentiality, we propose privacy-preserving algorithms for two important smart grid applications. 1) A distributed privacy-preserving quadratic optimization algorithm to solve Security Constrained Optimal Power Flow (SCOPF) problem. The SCOPF problem is decomposed into small subproblems using the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) and gradient projection algorithms. 2) We use Paillier cryptosystem to secure the computation of the power system dynamic simulation. The IEEE 3-Machine 9-Bus System is used to implement and demonstrate the proposed scheme. The security and performance analysis of our implementations demonstrate that our algorithms can prevent chosen-ciphertext attacks at a reasonable cost