NOVEL CRYPTOGRAPHIC AUTHENTICATION METHOD USING DNA SEQUENCE IN CLOUD ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

The rapid evolution of cloud computing services has encouraged many organizations to migrate towards consuming the cloud services, especially towards public cloud services, which is under the control of third party Cloud Services Provider (CSP). Due to which, many security issues gets associated with these services faced by both the cloud service providers and the customers. Thus, the responsibility of resolving these issues goes in both directions i.e. the service provider must ensure a secure infrastructure (the CSP must ensure the data isolation and data segregation) and customer must ensure security of their data through various authentication scheme and cryptographic algorithm. In this work, a novel cryptographic and authentication method is proposed for the cloud environment. The proposed approach ensures both the data integrity from customer’s point of view and authentication of enrolled users from cloud service provider point of view. It ensures data integrity by proposing a new symmetric image encryption algorithm using Henon Chaotic systems. Confusion and diffusion is increased by shuffling the image pixel in a specific order for several iterations. This encryption algorithm utilizes the property of the chaotic systems which is known for its randomness and unpredictable behaviour and thus providing a strong cryptographic framework to secure data. The symmetric key (seed) used for encryption is generated through the proposed key generation algorithm based on system entropy information and using DNA science. The ability of DNA to provide large data storage, genetic coding, massive parallel computation and generation of faked and random DNA sequence has increased the possibility of using DNA and gives a prominent direction in cryptographic research. When a user wants to access this encoded data, it needs to get authorized by the authentication server of the cloud. Thus, the proposed user authentication framework enables authentication server to validate the customer request and performs mutual authentication. The statistical analysis on key sensitivity and measurement of image encryption quality proves that the proposed image encryption approach gives a new dimension for secure image transfer. The security analysis, randomness testing of the key using NIST Test suites and resistance to various security attacks like replay attack, man-in the middle attack proves that proposed scheme serves the objective of the research and helps in lowering down the cloud-computing security concerns like data isolation, data integrity, authentication and account management.