A Multi-Level Privacy Scheme for Securing Data in a Cloud Environment

Privacy concern is often cited as one of the key factors that impede large-scale adoption of the cloud computing paradigm by enterprise customers. Existing solutions to privacy issue with respect to cloud computing, commonly through encryption mechanisms, often result in performance problem. This paper proposes and presents a multi-level privacy support scheme for addressing the trade-off between privacy of user’s data stored in the cloud and system performance. This is achieved by using encryption algorithms with varying strengths to protect the privacy of different categories of user’s data depending on their privacy sensitivity. Simulation results, using Jindael AES encryption algorithm as case study, lends credence to the efficacy of the proposed privacy scheme.