The cloud, a security risk? : A study on cloud computing and efficient encryption.

After many incidents of cloud services being attacked and personal user data leaking, a secure way of storing data on the cloud would be to encrypt. Even if an attacker would have access to the files he/she would not be able to decrypt the files without the secret key. In this thesis a software will be developed and works by securing user data by encrypting, prior uploading to the cloud. This software is a potential solution to the existing threat. The thesis presents many different methods of encryption but narrows it down to two, AES and XOR, which will be implemented into the software. This is done by statistically comparing the speed of each system. As well as comparing the expected time by using a student’s t-test calculating what degree of certainty one will be faster than the other. The thesis discusses and highlights level of security regarding cloud security. Comparisons of the algorithms are made to determine which method to be used under what circumstances