A Secure Data Transfer Technique for Cloud Computing

Abstract

Cloud Computing offers services to end-users rather than a product, by sharing resources, software and other information under a pay per usage model, hence economic benefit is the key for Cloud in terms of capital and operational expenditure. It permits hosting of different types of applications such as business, scientific and social networking because it has key characteristics like multi-tenancy, scalability, performance and security etc. Cloud Computing is currently facing challenges like Data Security, Energy Consumption, Server Consolidation, Virtual Machine Migration to name a few. Existing approaches of secure data transfer use two tier authentications, either based on OTP (One Time Password) which is static in nature and requires additional software/hardware or Digital Signature which leads to the problem of key management. This research work focuses on the study of secure data transfer by using different combination of mechanisms which not only ensure two tier authenticities without involving any above mentioned overheads but also maintain the confidentiality of data and integrity of message using one time key generation. In this thesis, existing secure data transfer techniques have been compared. A mechanism has been proposed and simulated for secure data transfer. This mechanism ensures three way protections in term of authenticity, confidentiality and integrity based on the concept of single key. This technique uses OTP and HMAC with Diffie Hellman Key Exchange to enhance data security in terms of authenticity and integrity in Cloud Computing environment. In this mechanism Optimally Modified HMAC has been used to prevent the man-in-middle-attack. An encryption algorithm has been used to maintain the confidentiality of data in transmits. Flow of the execution stages has been described using Flow Diagram and Sequence Diagram while f o r simulated environment; MATLAB Toolkit has been used to validate the experimental results of HMAC.