SECURING DATA DURING TRANSMISSION AND STORAGE: A HYBRID CRYPTOGRAPHIC APPROACH WITH BLOCKCHAIN INTEGRITY VERIFICATION

Abstract

The exponential growth of digital data transmission and storage has introduced significant security challenges, including eavesdropping, unauthorized access, and data tampering. This paper proposes a hybrid cryptographic framework combining AES-256 for storage encryption, RSA-2048 for secure key exchange, and blockchain-based integrity verification to ensure end-to-end security. Additionally, a machine learning-based anomaly detection system (LSTM + Random Forest) is integrated to identify intrusions in real-time. The implementation is tested on a cloud-based environment (AWS EC2) using the NSL-KDD dataset for intrusion detection. Results demonstrate 99.2% detection accuracy for unauthorized access and 15% faster encryption compared to traditional methods. The proposed model provides a scalable, quantum-resistant, and tamper-proof solution for modern data security challenges.