An empirical study of performance of block cipher algorithms in cloud computing environment

The security of private and sensitive data stored in the public domain is a major problem. It is critical for the user that data be safe both in transit and even after it has been stored on the server. The data owner must be guaranteed that the data held on the service provider site is safeguarded against data theft from outsiders, and the data must be protected even from the service providers. The secret key generation is one of the most important factors for the security of any cryptographic system because the length of the key directly affects the performance and prevents various cryptographic attacks such as brute force attacks. At the application level, our developed system efficiently secures sensitive, private, and personally identifiable information by ensuring privacy and confidentiality of data at rest in the public domain. This study also compares the performance of block cipher algorithms DES, 3DES, Blowfish, and AES. It was deduced from the result that AES consumes less time when compared to other symmetric algorithms with small consistent behavior for various cryptographic operations with small, medium and big datasets.