Privacy-Preserving Cloud Data Security: Integrating the Novel Opacus Encryption and Blockchain Key Management

Abstract

With the growing adoption of cloud-based technologies, maintaining the privacy and security of cloud data has become a pressing issue. Privacy-preserving encryption schemes are a promising approach for achieving cloud data security, but they require careful design and implementation to be effective. The integrated approach to cloud data security that we suggest in this work uses CogniGate: the orchestrated permissions protocol, index trees, blockchain key management, and unique Opacus encryption. Opacus encryption is a novel homomorphic encryption scheme that enables computation on encrypted data, making it a powerful tool for cloud data security. CogniGate Protocol enables more flexibility and control over access to cloud data by allowing for fine-grained limitations on access depending on user parameters. Index trees provide an efficient data structure for storing and retrieving encrypted data, while blockchain key management ensures the secure and decentralized storage of encryption keys. Performance evaluation focuses on key aspects, including computation cost for the data owner, computation cost for data sharers, the average time cost of index construction, query consumption for data providers, and time cost in key generation. The results highlight that the integrated approach safeguards cloud data while preserving privacy, maintaining usability, and demonstrating high performance. In addition, we explore the role of differential privacy in our integrated approach, showing how it can be used to further enhance privacy protection without compromising performance. We also discuss the key management challenges associated with our approach and propose a novel blockchain-based key management system that leverages smart contracts and consensus mechanisms to ensure the secure and decentralized storage of encryption keys.