GESJ: Computer Science and Telecommunications 2020|No.1(58) 17 CLOUD SECURITY USING LEAST SIGNIFICANT BIT STEGANOGRAPHY AND DATA ENCRYPTION STANDARD ALGORITHM Hambali Moshood Abiola 1 ,*, Gbolagade Morufat Damola 2 , Olasupo Yinusa Ademola 3 1, 3, Computer Science Department, Federal University Wukari, P.M.B 1020, Katsina-Ala Road, Wukari, Taraba State, Nigeria 2. Department of Computer Science, Al-Hikmah University, P.M.B 1601, Adewole Housing Estate, Ilorin, Kwara State, Nigeria. E-mail addresses: 1 hambali@fuwukari.edu.ng 2 dammyconsult@gmail.com , 3 yinusa@fuwukari.edu.ng *Corresponding Author ABSTRACT Cloud security is getting more important than ever before. The cloud platform and services are regards as massive accessible data centers that can be accessed anywhere and anytime. The increase in the cloud users has unfortunately also, been accompanied by the growth in malicious activities in the cloud. Millions of people are surfing the cloud for different purposes, hence they need a highly secured environment and consistent services. The future trend of cloud computing, especially in expanding the series of applications that requires a deeper degree of privacy and authentication. Cryptography and steganography are the two famous security measures to prevent unauthorized users to access information in the cloud. The goal of cryptography is data protection while that of steganography is to enable secret communication. Cryptography transforms the original data into an unreadable format (that is, ciphertext) to the typical user whereas steganography embedded a vital message in other digital media. We proposed a simple data protection model where data is encrypted using data encryption standard (DES) and least significant bit (LSB) steganography. The proposed model was able to provide two layer security strength to the documents by preventing unauthorized users from gaining access to the documents in the cloud. Keyword: DES, LSB, AES, Encryption Standard-Mobile Phone keypad (AES – MPK). 1. INTRODUCTION One of the evolving technologies today is cloud computing which is a technology subset of information technology. Cloud computing can be described as abstraction of computer and internet network that masked complex infrastructure (Basri, Mawengkang & Zamzami, 2018), that allows one to store, update and share information or build applications within a virtual server, managed by a cloud computing service provider. Cloud computing is basically rendered access to resources like server, networks, operating system, software applications and efficient storage space used by the user’s payable on demands (Nancy & Kamalinder, 2016) and can be accessed anywhere, anytime and with any device, all it requires is only browser applications (Mathew, 2012). Security in the cloud computing environment is a very vital and crucial aspect due to the significance of data stowed on the cloud and this data may be confidential and extremely sensitive. Therefore, there is a need for completely reliable data management and security protection for the data in the cloud. Though, there are some threats such as data theft known as breach/loss data may occur (Kaur & Singh, 2015). In this regard, the users are seriously concern, as they don't know who is accessing their data and whether changes are made on the data since the third party has full control on the data once it is sent to the cloud (Arockiam & Monikandan, 2013). There are two