Attribute based honey encryption algorithm for securing big data: Hadoop distributed file system perspective

Gayatri Kapil; Alka Agrawal; Abdulaziz Attaallah; Abdullah Algarni; Rajeev Kumar; Raees Ahmad Khan

doi:10.7717/peerj-cs.259

Attribute based honey encryption algorithm for securing big data: Hadoop distributed file system perspective

PeerJ Comput Sci. 2020 Feb 17:6:e259. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.259. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Gayatri Kapil¹, Alka Agrawal¹, Abdulaziz Attaallah², Abdullah Algarni², Rajeev Kumar¹, Raees Ahmad Khan¹

Affiliations

¹ Information Technology, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India.
² Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Abstract

Hadoop has become a promising platform to reliably process and store big data. It provides flexible and low cost services to huge data through Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) storage. Unfortunately, absence of any inherent security mechanism in Hadoop increases the possibility of malicious attacks on the data processed or stored through Hadoop. In this scenario, securing the data stored in HDFS becomes a challenging task. Hence, researchers and practitioners have intensified their efforts in working on mechanisms that would protect user's information collated in HDFS. This has led to the development of numerous encryption-decryption algorithms but their performance decreases as the file size increases. In the present study, the authors have enlisted a methodology to solve the issue of data security in Hadoop storage. The authors have integrated Attribute Based Encryption with the honey encryption on Hadoop, i.e., Attribute Based Honey Encryption (ABHE). This approach works on files that are encoded inside the HDFS and decoded inside the Mapper. In addition, the authors have evaluated the proposed ABHE algorithm by performing encryption-decryption on different sizes of files and have compared the same with existing ones including AES and AES with OTP algorithms. The ABHE algorithm shows considerable improvement in performance during the encryption-decryption of files.

Keywords: And encryption-decryption; Big data; Cloud storage; Data security; HDFS; Hadoop.

Grants and funding

This work is sponsored by Council of Science & Technology, Uttar Pradesh, India under F. No. CST/D-2408. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.