Implementation and Performance Analysis of Hybrid Cryptographic Schemes applied in Cloud Computing Environment

Cloud computing provides customers with infrastructure, platform, and software as services through the internet in a cost-effective way based on user demand. Sensitive or confidential information might be stored on the cloud servers and infrastructures that are neither controlled nor maintained by the customers, which might be a potential data breach. Therefore, security is the basic concern that limits the advantages of cloud computing. Cryptography plays a vital role to achieve that level of security required on the cloud. Hybrid cryptography takes the advantage of integrating more than one cryptographic algorithms to enhance the overall security and performance. In our research, we have proposed a comparative study for two-tier versus three-tier hybrid cryptographic models applied to secure data on the cloud. Practical implementation was made to the studied hybrid models using python simulation. Finally, a performance analysis was conducted in terms of encryption time, decryption time, average throughput, and efficiency using relatively larger data files. According to the experimental results, we observed the superiority of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) hybrid model among the other algorithms in terms of performance. Also, we found that the two-tier hybrid cryptographic model is more efficient than the three-tier model, but the latter provides more security. We intend to present a scientific contribution in the field of cloud computing data security.