Cifrado Cryptographic key based Open Source Data Backup Solution

Abstract

All the information you keep in your computer is stored on a hard drive. The important thing to know about hard drives is that they have moving parts and like all things which move, those parts wear out eventually. So you need to keep a copy of your information on something else as well. That's not the only reason to keep a copy somewhere else, your computer may be in a fire or a flood. A thief might steal the computer. Lightning might strike it. Someone might make a mistake and wipe out your database, without doing any damage to the computer itself. So we store the data somewhere else as well. Not instead most things you can back your information onto aren't any safer than the hard drive. But having it in two places is safer than one. Having it in three is even safer. In the world of IT there are lot of tools that used for the backup computer data. Those tools can be run on Windows operating systems or UNIX based operating systems. They are using different methods and techniques to make data backups. But most important thing of the backup data is that it should be kept in encrypted format in the backup drive. After a study, I found that most of the backup tool does not use any kind of data security mechanism and some are using passwords as a data security mechanism. But the password mechanism has major disadvantages. Therefore I have decided to build up solution where it will not use password as an encryption mechanism and this development is based on open source tool called duplicity. It uses hybrid encryption using Pretty Good Privacy tool. The proposed solution called Cifrado Backup tool and it has built using BASH scripts and Java. Key management component has built using PHP and mysql as database backend. With the evaluation, Cifrado tool has showed acceptable result which leads to implement it in live environment. This tool has made comparison with the Deja-dup tool which is another backup tool. But it needs to enhance the restoration process as a future work. Since it’s not able to restore data directly from the backup server. It must be addressed in the future and then Cifrado would be 100% perfect tool for backup and restoration which provide strong backup archive encryption mechanism as well.