AN ENHANCED CLOUD-BASED RANDOMISED CRYPTOGRAPHIC ALGORITHM FOR A PSEUDO-DNA ONE-TIME PAD (OTP) CIPHER

Abstract

A profound consequence of the benefits of the web as a communication platform, and the cloud as a storage medium, is ensuring the security of information in transit and in storage due to its nebulousness. The computational overhead and known attacks associated with the traditional cryptographic methods necessitate a shift in paradigm in order to overcome the shortcomings inherent in these native protocols. This paper proposed a secure lightweight cryptographic algorithm with low bandwidth and storage requirements, super polynomial-time computational complexity and linear run-time efficiency. It is based on DNA sequencing, which is ideal for securing cloud data. The proposed algorithm was anchored on a table search approach hinged on positional values of a fully randomized sorted array of integers. Key generation and encryption were composed of cryptographically strong pseudo-randomly generated artificial DNA sequences. Simulated results showed that the runtime complexity is linear for a message of length n while a unique ciphertext is generated for each run of the same message. Both encryption and decryption take less than 10ms for average length messages and compare favorably with other similar schemes. The implemented algorithm was evaluated for security using established parameters and offered remarkable resistance against many known cryptanalytic attacks.

Keywords—Cloud computing, Cloud security algorithm, DNA cryptography, Information security, One-time pad stream cipher