Implementation of a Hybrid Triple-Data Encryption Standard and Blowfish Algorithms for Enhancing Image Security in Cloud Environment

In recent years, technological advancements have provided the world with cloud computing which can transfer, store, and process huge data chunks in the form of video, audio, images, and text efficiently. In spite of the universal hype on the subject across the information technology world, protecting sensitive data stored in the cloud server is one of the crucial problems. The large volume and sophistication of cyberattacks conclude to the fact that private pictures need exceptional care than other forms of data on the cloud. Since the user who has stored their private pictures in the cloud has no control over the privacy protection of data, the cloud vendors have to assure a greater level of security in terms of authentication and prevention from cyberattacks. Image encryption algorithms secure visual data by transmuting pictures into an unintelligible form to preserve the confidentiality of pictures over reliable unrestricted social media. This work aims to develop a method for enhancing the security of user photographs on a cloud platform by means of cryptography algorithms. The proposed hybrid technique presents the idea of protecting images in two straightforward steps. First, we generate a chipper text (i.e., secret key) using Triple Data Encryption Standard (TDES) by giving a plaintext and a key as input. Then, the cipher text obtained from TDES is given to the Blowfish algorithm for encrypting the user images. The encrypted image is then uploaded to the database of the cloud server and can be retrieved whenever the user requests it. Both image encryption and decryption processes are analyzed and evaluated based on performance metrics such as cloud storage time, encryption time, decryption time, and encryption throughput. A comparative study with conventional image encryption methods will demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed method.