A SURVEY REPORT ON TECHNIQUES FOR DATA CONFIDENTIALITY IN CLOUD COMPUTING USING HOMOMORPHIC ENCRYPTION

Abstract

In order to store information, access content ubiquitously and run processes remotely, without the concern of existing infrastructure, a majority of users have resorted to using Cloud based technology. Cloud computing uses shared pools of configurable resources to provide varying computational capabilities to store and process data. This service is broadly classified into private clouds and third-party operated clouds. Because of the shared nature of this technology, cloud computing poses confidentiality concerns. Important data might be leaked either by the service provider itself, accidentally or intentionally, or by an external attacker who manages to gain unauthorized access. The solution is data encryption. However, encrypting data will make it unusable for computations or processing. Homomorphic Encryption techniques allow encrypted data to be processed like plain text data to give the same output. Thus the service provider will have access to encrypted data and can perform operations on it as well; however, the original data will be unknown. In this paper, we aim to present a survey on homomorphic encryption techniques from different categories and a comparative analysis of their application to maintain data confidentiality in cloud computing.