User Centered Data Security in Cloud Computing Using Steganography

Cloud computing is one of the result of rapid growth of computing technology which has now affect the very way by which organizations and individuals uses IT resources such as application, storage, etc. by providing shared virtual versions of such resources which comes with the benefit of reducing the cost of hardware and software installation, but the concerns of organizations lies within the security and privacy of their data at rest on the cloud storage, among such concerns are the unauthorized usage by possible malicious insider within the cloud provider organisation and other cloud users. Despite the fact that service providers used many mechanisms to protect unauthorized access to data stored in their cloud storage, but there is no any mechanism to protect unauthorized access to the client’s data by the cloud service administrator. In this work we show how a steganography which is a technique of concealing the existence of a data inside a cover medium can be used to improve the security of data in the cloud by using additional layer of security that is user centric. However, the application of the proposed technique is implemented using a particular case study.