A Light-Weight Permutation Based Method for Data Privacy in Mobile Cloud Computing

Cloud computing paradigm provides virtual IT infrastructures with a set of resources that are shared with multi-tenant users. Data Privacy is one of the major challenges when users outsource their data to a cloud computing system. Privacy can be violated by the cloud vendor, vendor's authorized users, other cloud users, unauthorized users, or external malicious entities. Encryption is one of the solutions to protect and maintain privacy of cloud-stored data. However, encryption methods are complex and expensive for mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a new light-weight method for mobile clients to store data on one or multiple clouds by using pseudo-random permutation based on chaos systems. The proposed method can be used in the client mobile devices to store data in the cloud(s) without using cloud computing resources for encryption to maintain user's privacy. We consider JPEG image format as a case study to present and evaluate the proposed method. Our experimental results show that the proposed method achieve superior performance compared to over encryption methods, such as AES and encryption on JPEG encoders while protecting the mobile user data privacy. We review major security attack scenarios against the proposed method that shows the level of security.