Advanced Security Model for Cloud Infrastructure Using Cryptography and Steganography

Cloud computing offers an infrastructure for individual to business with fluctuating workloads by enabling clients to use resources such as memory, software, hardware, bandwidth etc., on "pay on use"method. Security is a very big challenge when we are dealing with third party services/ cloud infrastructures. Improving the security of data stored on cloud infrastructure is the primary goal of this article. It is achieved by incorporating the features of cryptographic and steganographic techniques. The proposed system introduces a two-level security framework involving cryptographic and steganographic modules. The proposed cryptography module provided improved information security with reduced computational complexity by addressing the challenges of traditional encryption methods. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is used to classify data into segments requiring different levels of security. High-security segments are encrypted using higher end cryptography algorithms like AES, while lower-security segments use simpler methods like substitution techniques. It results in reduced computational complexity. The proposed system further secures the data with the help of steganography. It embedded the encrypted information over the images using the YUV color model, specifically manipulating the brightness component to conceal the data. This combined strategy ensures effective and safe cloud data storage by providing strong security with little computational overhead. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing method in the context of better computational complexity, image quality index and embedded and extraction time in evaluating the stego image.