Optimized Hybrid Cryptography for Cloud Data Security: ECC-AES Integration with Performance Evaluation

Abstract Cloud computing enables convenient data storage but introduces security challenges. Some proposed security solutions for protecting cloud environ- ments are in the literature. However, these methods may not be suitable for a wide range of applications in a cloud environment due to their high computing and communication overheads, because if the security protocol is strengthened, it inversely impacts performance and vice versa. Further- more, these security frameworks are vulnerable to several attacks and also lack strong user anonymity and privacy protection for the end user. To ad- dress these issues, we proposed a novel hybrid approach combining Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), referred to as the ECC-AES approach. Our novel approach will overcome these issues without increasing computational power and cost. Experiments show that including Encryption Time, Decryption Time, and computational power demonstrate that ECC-AES not only shows high performance but also achieves high classification accuracy under various cryptographic attacks. Specifically, ECC-AES performs really well and achieves a 40% reduction in encryption time and 45% reduction in decryption time, and a maximum of 35–45% of energy consumption as compared to existing methods.