ECM: Enhanced confidentiality method to ensure the secure migration of data in VM to cloud environment

Abstract

1. Cloud is the technology behind all modern IT paradigms today. All kinds of applications run in the cloud environment and host their data. Enterprises show interest in migrating their data and servers to the cloud to benefit the cloud. The cloud is an open distributed network environment; hence, it is vulnerable to data security attacks. Migration in cloud computing permits the handover of resources, for example, virtual machine (VM) and data from off-premises to on-premises. During the migration, the data needs to be secured. This paper proposes an enhanced confidentiality technique (ECM) to ensure data security when migrated to the cloud. The proposed enhancement is on the advanced encryption standard (AES) to strengthen the protection level of the AES. The standard AES runs for rounds with four unique stages of data processing: Substitute bytes, add round key, shift rows and mix columns. The proposed ECM enhances the substitute bytes stage with dynamic substitution boxes for each round of the AES. The proposed ECM is evaluated for its efficiency by the avalanche effect. The result of the ECM improves data protection when the data is migrated to the cloud.