A Novel Cryptographic Encryption Technique for Securing Digital Images in the Cloud Using AES and RGB Pixel Displacement

In today´s cyberspace, Information security plays an active role in ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of data transmission or storage. One of the foremost fears with the rapid increment of adoption of data storage in the cloud environment is data security. Media contents such as images and video recordings needed to be highly encrypted without any loss of information during the encryption and the decryption process. Contents such as medical images, surveillance images, personal photos, etc needed to be well protected. This paper proposes a hybrid approach of encryption of images using an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and an RGB cryptographic technique. The Method made use of AES for the generation of a shared secret key which is then used by the visual cryptographic algorithm for the encryption process. The encryption is done solely based on RGB pixel shuffling and displacement. At the end of the process, there was no pixel expansion hence there was no loss in image quality. The programming and simulation of the processes as well as the analysis of the results were done using MATLAB.