A novel DNA-inspired encryption strategy for concealing cloud storage

Over the last few years, the need of a cloud environment with the ability to detect illegal behaviours along with a secured data storage capability has increased largely. This study presents such a secured cloud storage framework comprising of a deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) based encryption key which has been generated to make the framework unbreakable, thus ensuring a better and secured distributed cloud storage environment. Furthermore, this work proposes a novel DNA-based encryption technique inspired by the biological characteristics of DNA and the protein synthesis mechanism. The introduced DNA based model also has an additional advantage of being able to decide on selecting suitable storage servers from an existing pool of storage servers on which the data must be stored. A fuzzy-based technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) multi-criteria decisionmaking (MCDM) model has been employed to achieve the above-mentioned goal. This can decide the set of suitable storage servers and also results in a reduction in execution time by keeping up the level of security to an improved grade. This study also investigates and analyzes the strength of the proposed S-Box and encryption technique against some standard criteria and benchmarks, such as avalanche effect, correlation coefficient, information entropy, linear probability, and differential probability etc. After the avalanche effect analysis, the average change in cipher-text has been found to be 51.85%. Moreover, thorough security, sensitivity and functionality analysis show that the proposed scheme guarantees high security with robustness.