A Hybrid Identity Protection and Multi-Factor Authentication Framework for Cloud Security

Abstract

The increasing reliance on cloud-based storage systems has created significant challenges in ensuring secure file sharing, user authentication, and data confidentiality. Traditional file-sharing systems commonly depend on single-factor authentication and basic encryption mechanisms, which are vulnerable to unauthorized access, data breaches, and inefficient performance when handling sensitive information. These limitations highlight the need for a secure and efficient platform that integrates strong authentication techniques with advanced cryptographic solutions. The main problem addressed in this research is the development of a secure cloud file-sharing system that enhances authentication reliability and encryption efficiency while maintaining controlled user access. Existing systems often lack multi-layer security, biometric authentication, and performance analysis of encryption techniques, resulting in weaker protection and limited scalability. The proposed system is developed using the Django web framework for backend implementation and MySQL as the database management system for securely storing user credentials, file metadata, and access control information. The system integrates Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) for asymmetric encryption and ChaCha20 for high-speed symmetric encryption, enabling secure file upload, storage, and download operations. ECC provides strong key-based encryption for data security, while ChaCha20 improves computational efficiency during encryption processes. Additionally, multi-factor authentication is implemented by combining password hashing with fingerprint-based biometric verification to strengthen user identity validation. The system also evaluates and compares the computation time of ECC and ChaCha20 algorithms, presenting performance results through graphical visualization. The significance of the proposed system lies in its ability to enhance data protection, improve authentication security, and optimize encryption performance within a scalable web-based architecture using Django and MySQL, making it suitable for secure cloud storage and file-sharing applications.