Open Access

ARTICLE

Cloud Data Encryption and Authentication Based on Enhanced Merkle Hash Tree Method

J. Stanly Jayaprakash¹, Kishore Balasubramanian², Rossilawati Sulaiman³, Mohammad Kamrul Hasan^3,*, B. D. Parameshachari⁴, Celestine Iwendi⁵

1 Department of CSE, Mahendra Institute of Technology, Namakkal, 637503, India
2 Department of EEE, Dr. Mahalingam College of Engineering and Technology, Pollachi, 642003, India
3 Center for Cyber Security, Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), 43600, Bangi, Malaysia
4 Department of Telecommunication Engineering, GSSS Institute of Engineering and Technology for Women, Mysuru, India
5 School of Creative Technologies, University of Bolton, Deane Road, Bolton, United Kingdom

* Corresponding Author: Mohammad Kamrul Hasan. Email:

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Next - Generation Secure Solutions for Wireless Communications, IoT and SDNs)

Computers, Materials & Continua 2022, 72(1), 519-534. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2022.021269

Received 28 June 2021; Accepted 03 September 2021; Issue published 24 February 2022

Abstract

Many organizations apply cloud computing to store and effectively process data for various applications. The user uploads the data in the cloud has less security due to the unreliable verification process of data integrity. In this research, an enhanced Merkle hash tree method of effective authentication model is proposed in the multi-owner cloud to increase the security of the cloud data. Merkle Hash tree applies the leaf nodes with a hash tag and the non-leaf node contains the table of hash information of child to encrypt the large data. Merkle Hash tree provides the efficient mapping of data and easily identifies the changes made in the data due to proper structure. The developed model supports privacy-preserving public auditing to provide a secure cloud storage system. The data owners upload the data in the cloud and edit the data using the private key. An enhanced Merkle hash tree method stores the data in the cloud server and splits it into batches. The data files requested by the data owner are audit by a third-party auditor and the multi-owner authentication method is applied during the modification process to authenticate the user. The result shows that the proposed method reduces the encryption and decryption time for cloud data storage by 2–167 ms when compared to the existing Advanced Encryption Standard and Blowfish.

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Keywords

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