Joint fingerprinting/encryption for medical image security

Abstract

Electronic health records (EHRs) facilitates the healthcare process. However, it can also cause serious security and privacy problems. While various conventional encryption mechanisms can solve some aspects of these problems, they cannot address the illegal distribution of decrypted medical images. To protect decrypted medical images from being illegally distributed by an authorized staff member, the scheme proposed in this paper provides a joint fingerprinting and encryption (JFE) scheme based on GoL (Game of Life) and DNA computing with the purpose of protecting medical media distribution. In this study, GoL and DNA are used to confuse in DWT domain and diffusion in spatial domain respectively, and fingerprints are embedded into the HL and LH subbands of DWT domain. The use of fingerprinting along with encryption can provide a double-layer of protection to medical image. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.