Elliptic Curve Cryptography Performance Evaluation for Securing Multi- Factor Systems in a Cloud Computing Environment

Abstract

In the contemporary world, the security of data and privacy policies are majorconcerns in cloud computing. Data stored on the cloud has been claimed to beunsafe and liable to be hacked. Users have found it difficult to trust their data in thecloud. Users want to know that their data is accessible from anywhere and that anunauthorized user will not be able to access it. Another area of concern is theauthentication of users over the cloud. There are a number of security concerns withCloud Computing which include Distributed Denial of Service, Data leakage, andmany more, just to mention a few. In this paper, an Elliptic Curve Cryptography(ECC) algorithm is used for the encryption and decryption of the information storedon the cloud, so that if someone gains access to the server, it would be unable toaccess the original information. Performance evaluation of the developed system isperformed by comparing ECC with the RSA algorithm. The results show that theECC method is more efficient than RSA when used to secure information in thecloud.