HE-AO: An Optimization-Based Encryption Approach for Data Delivery Model in A Multi-Tenant Environment.

Recently, cloud computing has become a growing technology in the information technology industry because of its several smooth delivery services. In cloud computing, multi-tenancy is one of the primary features that affords economic and scalability significance to the service providers and end-users by distributing a similar cloud platform. Due to the increasing demand for cloud computing, cloud usage has increased, so various vulnerabilities and threats have also been enhanced. Hence, data security and privacy are considered the major issues of multi-tenant environments in the cloud. Several existing studies have developed different mechanisms to solve security issues in multi-tenant cloud environments. However, they faced various problems while improving security, and this led to a lack of confidentiality, authenticity, and data integrity. Thus, this research paper intends to propose an efficient encryption approach for securing data delivery in the cloud with reduced time. For secure data delivery, homomorphic encryption is utilized to encode the cloud server's data. In homomorphic encryption, four stages are available for data delivery: key generation, encryption, decryption, and evaluation. The main problems in this homomorphic encryption mechanism are key sharing and key management. Due to these problems, the performance of homomorphic encryption is diminished. Thus, the proposed work introduces an Aquila optimizer for the key generation process. In this, optimal keys are selected, and it provides improved data security and privacy for cloud users. Finally, the selected keys are generated for the encryption and decryption process. The efficiency of the proposed approach is proved by comparing the performance in terms of encryption time, decryption time and throughput over the existing schemes like Rivest, Shamir and Adleman, ElGamal, Algebra Homomorphic Encryption scheme based on ElGamal (AHEE) and modified AHEE. The experimental results reveal that the proposed model achieves reduced encryption and decryption time of 972 ms and 4261 ms for the data size ranges from 5 to 25 mb. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]