Symmetric Hash Encryption Image as Key (SHEIK)

Abstract

Cloud storage model have become a widely accepted solution for the growing demand of online storage and remote accessing. Cloud service provider (CSP) provides the online storage facility for the cloud customer (CC) as per pay-by-use model. Data security still remains a threat for the CC to have a complete trust on the technology. The existing symmetric key algorithms to some extent have been successful in providing the confidentiality of the data. The main issue in implementing the algorithm is sharing of the key, if the key is known to others the security of the data is exploited. This paper tries to sort out the problem by making image as a key for the algorithm. The CC can perform the encryption before uploading the data to have the control of the process. The selection of the algorithm decides the key length to be extracted from the image making the method more secure and reliable for the CC. The experimental results have shown that the proposed Symmetric Hash Encryption Image as Key(SHEIK) method works satisfactorily for encrypting and decrypting the data efficiently.