Performance Analysis of Text and Image Steganography with RSA Algorithm in Cloud Computing

Abstract

Cloud computing provides a lot of shareable resources payable on demand to the users. The drawback with cloud computing is the security challenges since the data in the cloud are managed by third party. Steganography and cryptography are some of the security measures applied in the cloud to secure user data. The objective of steganography is to hide the existence of communication from the unintended users whereas cryptography does provide security to user data to be transferred in the cloud. Since users pay for the services utilize in the cloud, the need to evaluate the performance of the algorithms used in the cloud to secure user data in order to know the resource consumed by such algorithms such as storage memory, network bandwidth, computing power, encryption and decryption time becomes imperative. In this work, we implemented and evaluated the performance of Text steganography and RSA algorithm and Image steganography and RSA as Digital signature considering four test cases. The simulation results show that, image steganography with RSA as digital signature performs better than text steganography and RSA algorithm. The performance differences between the two algorithms are 10.76, 9.93, 10.53 and 10.53 seconds for encryption time, 60.68, 40.94, 40.9, and 41.85 seconds for decryption time, 8.1, 10.92, 15.2 and 5.17 mb for memory used when hiding data, 5.3, 1.95 and 17.18 mb for memory used when extracting data, 0.93, 1.04, 1.36 and 3.76 mb for bandwidth used, 75.75, 36.2, 36.9 and 37.45 kwh for processing power used when hiding and extracting data respectively. Except in test case2 where Text steganography and RSA algorithm perform better than Image Steganography and RSA as Digital Signature in terms of memory used when extracting data with performance difference of -5.09 mb because of the bit size of the image data when extracted. This research work recommend the use of image steganography and RSA as digital signature to cloud service providers and users since it can secure major data types such as text, image, audio and video used in the cloud and consume less system resources.