Location-Based Cryptographic Techniques for Data Protection

Data protection has become one of the significant issues in cloud computing when end users must rely on their cloud providers for security purposes. Cloud providers never guarantee the security of data. One of the best ways to overcome this issue is to have the data encrypted before it reaches the cloud servers. Cryptographic becomes a common mechanism used to transmit data securely in open networks, but there are also some challenges to implement encryption internally due to key management. Either the keys are vulnerable towards any security attacks such as HTTP-focused-brute-force attack during transmit over the network, in case of the keys are kept at the user site, or keys are missing if the device is stolen. Thus, location-based encryption adds another layer of security on top of existing encryption method. Location-based encryption enhances security by implementing location information into the encryption and decryption process to counter the possible problems. Location coordinates are used as a key for encrypting the data and the cipher text can only be decrypted if and only the decrypted location is matched with the location that has been computed with the key. In this paper discuss on location-based encryption technique that has been implemented in previous works which are asymmetric, symmetric and hybrid algorithm followed by its strengths and weaknesses. This paper finds that majority of the researchers used hybrid algorithm to implement their location-based encryption instead of using the asymmetric algorithm or hybrid algorithm alone because the hybrid algorithm has fast computation of symmetric algorithm and high security of asymmetric dual keys