Storing data in a third party cloud system causes serious problems on data confidentiality. Generally, encryption techniques provide data confidentiality but with limited functionality, which occurs due to unsupported actions of encryption operation in cloud storage space. Hence, developing a decentralized secure storage system with multiple support functions like encryption, encoding, and forwarding tends to get complicated, when the storage system spreads. This paper aims mainly on hiding image information using specialized steganographic image authentication (SSIA) algorithm in clustered cloud systems. The SSIA algorithm is applied to virtual elastic clusters in a public cloud platform. Here, the SSIA algorithm embeds the image information using blowfish algorithm and genetic operators. Initially, the blowfish symmetric block encryption is applied over the image and then the genetic operator is applied to re-encrypt the image information. The proposed algorithm provides an improved security than conventional blowfish algorithm in a clustered cloud system. ARTICLE HISTORY

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