Outsourcing large volumes of data to public cloud has the potential benefits to consumers. It also brings security issues as the cloud is treated as untrusted from the user point of view. Security issues may arise due to many reasons such as virtualization, resource pooling, elasticity, hidden hardware problems besides internal and external attacks launched by adversaries. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between Cloud Service Provider (CSP) and cloud consumer are to be honoured for better

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... welfare. Therefore, it is indispensable to have mechanisms to ensure security to outsourced data when it is at rest and when it is in transit as well. Towards this end, many solutions came as found in the literature. However, most of the cryptographic methods employed were expensive. It is still an open challenge to develop light weight cryptographic methods for secure storage and retrieval or search for outsourced encrypted data. In this paper we proposed a methodology for light weight encryption which proved to be effective and suitable for cloud computing environments. An algorithm named Hybrid Lightweight Data Encryption (HLDE) is proposed and implemented. Empirical study is made on the same to validate our approach. The experimental results revealed that the proposed method is better than the state of the art in terms of high performance and strong security to outsourced data in cloud computing.