A Comparative Study of Encryption Methods for Cloud Query Processing

Query cloud process is an interested research study that caught many researchers’ attentions. Several studies have presented different types of encryption in order to encrypt the data prior to being migrated over the cloud. However, there is an essential demand to balance between the time consumption and encryption security. This paper presented a comparative study of encryption methods for query execution over the cloud. Three common encryption methods have been used including Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). A benchmark dataset of queries has been used in the experiments. Based on the time of encryption and decryption along with the secrecy measure, the three methods have been evaluated. Results showed that RSA has the most competitive performance in terms of encryption and decryption time, meanwhile, it has a competitive secrecy measure values. It achieved an average encryption time of 0.57, 1.41 and 0.59 for Delete, Add and Select queries, as well as, it achieved an average decryption time of 2.31, 4.24 and 1.79 for Delete, Add and Select queries. Finally, RSA obtained an average secrecy of 1.10, 1.10 and 1.15 for Delete, Add and Select queries. This emphasis the usefulness of using RSA to maintain both efficiency and security of encryption.