A Privacy-Preserving Scheme for Medical Diagnosis Records Based on Encrypted Image Steganography

Abstract

Healthcare records are essential as they establish perpetual reports on the health of patients. These records are in nature meant to be kept confidential. It is for this reason that the data should be secured before transmission. Steganography and cryptography are old concepts used to secure communications. Steganography is hiding data in a carrier, for instance, images, videos, texts, and files. It seeks to hide the existence of communications. Cryptography is communication in deciphering secret writings or ciphers. Steganography and cryptography can both work independently, the two techniques are combined to make communications more secure. In our privacypreserving scheme for medical diagnosis records, a hybrid approach is used to ensure the maximum security of medical records before transmission. The proposed system utilizes AES 128 which is symmetric key encryption to scramble the data. As compared to asymmetric key encryption, symmetric key encryption is faster because both encryption and decryption utilizes a single key. The proposed system makes use of the Diffie Hellman key exchange algorithm for key agreement. The least significant bit (LSB) which involves the hiding of information in the most repetitive bits of each pixel of an image is implemented for steganography. The technique was chosen because the level of distortion made on the image is low hence the image quality change is minimal