Cryptography: A New Dawn In Cloud Security

The seamless exchange of data and the liberty of 24×7 access allow the businesses to ensure smooth operations continuously. Even though the cloud service is straightforward to implement, one must be equally cautious that information might be compromised if organisations don’t take appropriate measures.

The vast array of raw and unprocessed data in the cloud attracts potential cyber threats to lurk around, resulting in possible data breaches. To deal with such cases, one needs to know the complete whereabouts of their data, even if handed over to an expert. This is where cryptography steps in.

There’s no better way to safeguard the critical data than through cryptography, especially when that data is stored in the cloud.

Cryptography has come a long way since its inception. The speed of its development has been particularly quick over the last two decades for all industries including assignment writing service companies. Indeed, many vital aspects of our modern world – finance, e-commerce, communications, national security – are established on the bedrock of cryptography.

On that note, let’s take you through how cloud cryptography works, its challenges, and its benefits.

What is cryptography in the cloud?

Cryptography in the cloud adopts encryption techniques to safeguard data that will be used or saved in the cloud. It enables the users to conveniently and safely access shared cloud services, as any data that are hosted by cloud service providers is protected with encryption. Cryptography in the cloud offers adequate protection to sensitive data without delaying the exchange of relevant information.

Cryptography in the cloud allows for securing critical data beyond your corporate IT environment, where that specific data is no longer under your control. As per the experts of cryptography, whether it’s the information at rest or information in motion, all of it is best protected by cryptographic security measures.

In the case of cloud, you don’t have the actual physical control over the storage of information. Hence, the only way you can ensure that the information is secure is for it to be stored cryptographically by maintaining control of the cryptographic key.

The implementation of cloud cryptography: A secure alternative

The advantages of cloud computing are explored by more companies and organisations every day. Cloud computing allows clients to have a virtual computing system on which they can save data and run applications. But, cloud computing has introduced its fair share of security threats because cloud operators save and handle client data outside of the reach of clients’ existing security measures.

Hence, different organisations are designing cryptographic protocols customised to cloud computing in an endeavour to balance performance and security efficiently.

Most cloud computing infrastructures don’t offer security against unreliable cloud operators. Now, this comes off as a challenge for organisations that need to save and retain sensitive, confidential details like financial and medical records, or high-impact business information.

As cloud computing continues to witness an exponential growth in popularity, there are many cloud computing service providers and researchers who are pursuing cloud cryptography projects to fulfil the business demands and roadblocks associated with cloud security and data protection.

There are several approaches to implementing cryptography to cloud data. Many organisations try encrypting data before uploading it to the cloud altogether. This approach is advantageous. That’s because data is encrypted before it’s transmitted from the organisation’s environment. The same data can only be decrypted by authorised parties that have access to the appropriate decryption keys.

There are cloud services that are perfectly capable of encrypting data upon receipt, ensuring that any data they are saving or transferring is protected by encryption by default. Some cloud services may not provide encryption features, but at the very least, should use encrypted connections like SSL or HTTPS to ensure that data is secured in transit.

Challenges of using cloud cryptography

Cryptography involves the management of cryptographic keys. Whether that’s in the symmetric key cryptography, which is where both sender and recipient use the same key for encrypting and decrypting. This key must be a secret that no other human being should know about on the face of the earth.

Or, whether it’s asymmetric cryptography, which is where you utilise a private and a public key separately. This is found in most digital signature implementations, and even in that, the private key has to be kept secret and again isn’t meant to be shared between any other people.

The quote by Benjamin Franklin that ‘Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead’ is altered in the case of cryptography. It would be more fitting to alter the adage to “two can keep a secret if both of them are dead.” Cryptographic secrets shouldn’t be known by human beings. It wouldn’t be ideal for a human being to give up a cryptographic key.

This is where things become challenging in the cloud environment.If you are outsourcing the applications, and therefore the computations, those have to be done in the clear. Now, you have a situation where your data must be decrypted by someone in the cloud so that they can perform the functions that you are asking them to perform and then re-encrypt it for storage.

That makes the person part of the cryptographic key management process. This is always a challenge because you may not be in a position to directly audit or monitor that process. But it’s still crucial to know if your information is safe or not.

The management of cloud encryption and cryptography

Organisations need to take a data-driven approach to secure their sensitive data to protect against several advanced challenges in the complex and evolving environments of mobility, virtualisation, and cloud services. Companies need to employ data security solutions that offer continuous protection of sensitive data, which includes cloud data protection through encryption and cryptographic key management.

A comprehensive platform for cloud security and encryption must also deliver robust access controls and critical management abilities that allow organisations to practically and cost-effectively leverage encryption to address security objectives.

Parting thoughts,

Security plays a critical role in cloud computing, particularly in significant areas like Storage, Data, Network, and Application. In this case, there are various cryptographic techniques available that would help in dealing with the security issues in the Cloud. Now that you have gathered some basic ideas on cryptography and cloud security, you can start exploring them either individually to maintain data security and integrity.

Guest article written by: Bella Jonas is a professional tech blogger who is currently working at one of the leading IT firms in New York, USA. She has also been a part of My assignment help for the past couple of years, delivering assignment writing help to students who seek assistance. She loves to adventure new places and make new friends during vacations.