Secret data sharing in cloud environment using steganography and encryption using GA

Cloud Computing is the next step in the evolution of on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction where Infrastructure, Platform and Software can be accessed as a service. The clients accessing the service, pay for what they use. Cloud Computing provides benefits in terms of low cost and accessibility of data, but its unique aspect is its security. Sharing of data is an important functionality in cloud storage. In cloud computing environment data sharing and transfer has increased exponentially. Security, integrity, non-repudiation, confidentiality, and authentication services are the most important factors in data-security. Maintaining Confidentiality and Security for critical data are highly challenging, especially when these data are stored in memory or send through the communication networks. The confidential data are embedded steganography. Data encryption technique tries to convert data to another data that is hard to understand. In this paper, a crypto-stego methodology has been proposed where image steganography and a new method of cryptographic technique is used. The steganographic technique embedded confidential data using Pixel Mapping Method (PMM), but in a chaotic sequence generated by chaotic map technique. The encryption and decryption uses Genetic Algorithm (GA) which is used to produce a cryptographic method with the help of the powerful features of the Crossover and Mutation operations of GA. Both the encryption and steganography process use secret session key which are generated using the combination of some universal feature of cover image and the users user's secret key.