Effective ASCII-HEX Steganography for Secure Cloud

Abstract

There are many reasons of cloud computing popularity some of the most important are; backup and rescue, cost effective, nearly limitless storage, automatic software amalgamation, easy access to information and many more. Pay-as-you-go model is followed to provide everything as a service. Data is secured by using standard security policies available at cloud end. In spite of its many benefits, as mentioned above, cloud computing has also some security issues. Provider as well as customer has to provide and collect data in a secure manner. Both of these issues plus efficient transmitting of data over cloud are very critical issues and needed to be resolved. There is need of security during the travel time of sensitive data over the network that can be processed or stored by the customer. Security to the customer's data at the provider end can be provided by using current security algorithms, which are not known by the customer. There is reliability problem due to existence of multiple boundaries in the cloud resource access. ASCII and HEX security with steganography is used to propose an algorithm that stores the encrypted data/cipher text in an image file which will be then sent to the cloud end. This is done by using CDM (Common Deployment Model). In future, an algorithm should be proposed and implemented for the security of virtual images in the cloud computing.