Abstract

Cloud computing has emerged as a transformative technology that provides scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions for data storage, processing, and management. Despite its extensive adoption, it continues to face significant security challenges concerning the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data. Threats such as data breaches, unauthorized access, and malicious tampering are particularly critical in sensitive domains like healthcare, finance, and e-learning, where data privacy is paramount. To mitigate these issues, this research introduces a hybrid cryptographic framework that combines the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256) for secure data encryption with the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-256) for integrity verification. The proposed system was implemented and tested on Amazon Web Services (AWS), leveraging S3 for data storage and Identity and Access Management (IAM) for access control. Various file types—including text, image, and multimedia—were encrypted on a MacBook Air M2 prior to uploading. Performance metrics such as encryption and decryption time, hashing duration, upload/download latency, and system resource utilization were measured, along with security evaluations involving hash verification, unauthorized access detection, and tampering simulations. Experimental results demonstrate that the integration of AES-256 and SHA-256 provides a robust, scalable, and efficient data protection mechanism for cloud environments. This dual-layer framework effectively ensures both confidentiality and integrity without imposing substantial performance overhead, making it suitable for real-world deployment. Furthermore, the study addresses existing research gaps in dynamic data protection and large-scale data optimization while paving the way for future advancements such as multi-cloud integration, adaptive access control, and intelligent threat detection mechanisms.

Keywords

Cloud Security, Data Security, AES-256, SHA-256, Cryptography, Data Integrity, Data Confidentiality, Hybrid Encryption, Cloud Storage, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Identity and Access Management (IAM), Hash Verification, Data Protection.

Citation(in IEEE Format)

Mayank Joshi, Anuja Chincholkar, Anuj Londhe, Parth Gole and Saniya Mirgale, “Enhancing Cloud Data Security Through AES Encryption and SHA-256 Integrity Verification,” International Journal of Multidisciplinary Innovative Research (IJMIR), vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 28–37, January 2026.