A novel cryptographic and steganographic approach for secure cloud data migration

The flexibility to store unlimited data without any worry about storage limitations available at our disposal and the freedom to use it as and when required from anywhere in the world makes cloud computing the most preferred technology & platform to store and transfer data. Organizations and individual users are now very much comfortable to let their all-important data and software reside on the cloud servers and make themselves free from all the concerns of storage and security. However, every flexibility or benefits comes at a price and cloud computing too is not an exception. The threat of user´s privacy, data confidentiality & integrity and data safety are always looming around. Among all of these, the secure transfer of data from organization´s premises to the cloud servers is of utmost importance. So many encryption techniques and algorithms have been proposed by researchers in recent times to move data securely from their end to the servers. In this research paper, we propose a design for cloud architecture which ensures secure data transmission from the client´s organization to the servers of the Cloud Service provider (CSP). We have used a combined approach of cryptography and steganography because it will provide a two way security to the data being transmitted on the network. First, the data gets converted into a coded format through the use of encryption algorithm and then this coded format data is again converted into a rough image through the use of steganography. Moreover, steganography also hides the existence of the message, thereby ensuring that the chances of data being tampered are minimal.