An Hyperelliptic with Cellular Automata Encryption-based Data Protection Technique for Cloud Systems

Abstract

The difficulty of data protection and privacy substantially inhibits the adoption of cloud technology, despite its popularity for efficiently providing access to data and other computing resources over the internet. Existing cloud data protection techniques have been found of failing to achieve lower computational costs, effective management of lengthy keys, efficient parallel computation, and the maintenance of balance between reliability of data protection and overhead. This research therefore, developed an improved encryption technique (HeCA) for achieving a high level of security with minimal computational cost and complexity in cloud-based systems. The HeCA was developed by combining a CA-based encryption/decryption, and a hyper-elliptic based signcryption/unsigncryption algorithms, that were formulated for the encryption/decryption of text and image data, and signcription/unsincryption of the secret keys respectively. The performance of the developed technique in comparison to existing BCAL and CA-RSA encryption techniques, was evaluated in the MATLAB R2020a environment using key length, processing time, and throughput as metrics. The results show that the developed HeCA technique outperforms the SBCAL and CA-RSA schemes in terms of key length, processing time and throughput. It is therefore concluded that the development of the HeCA has offered a superior data protection technique for cloud-based systems.