Securing System Logs in Financial Institutions using Hybrid AES-ECC Cryptography

Abstract

In today's modern Interconnected electronic world, securing log files is a significant problem which is rapidly becoming an issue of great concern to both individuals and corporate/business organizations. More often than not, editing (altering) or outright erasing of organization's log files seems to be the first point of call for hackers upon gaining access (unauthorized) into their system or network. This which they do in a bid to erase traces of their presence, often leaves system administrators clueless to the fact that they have been hacked, therefore preventing them from taking actions to secure their systems. This has often resulted in monumental loss to these organizations, especially those in the financial services domain like banks. Thus, development of secure methods for storing log files is of tremendous importance for continuous/sustained information security in such organizations. This paper proposes a hybrid Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography based framework for improving the security of log files in financial systems. This chemistry offers robust security of financial information. This will greatly enable organizations to mutually protect their sensitive log data even if their system or network gets maliciously compromised. The design was then implemented using Javascript, php and MySQL. The audit management system is robust against common cyber-attacks and has additional property of being lightweight and simple, that is, the proposed system has low computational resource demand