Simplified and Efficient Framework for Securing Medical Image Processing Over Cloud Computing

Abstract

As the utilization of imaging tools increases in healthcare domain, cloud applications are becoming a popular approach for processing medical data. In addition to being the most affordable solution, this approach offers simple and efficient mechanisms to manage clients’ data. In this regard, this concept aims at completely replacing traditional on-premises data centers and moving computations to the cloud. These advantages would inevitably accelerate the adoption of cloud-based data processing in the healthcare industry. Despite many advantages of using cloud services, outsourcing data processing to an external provider could jeopardize the duty to preserve the confidentiality of patients’ data. In fact, security and privacy issues obstruct this paradigm from achieving greater success in medical sector. In this context, there are several approaches and techniques to protect clients’ data against potentially malicious cloud providers. A survey of existing methods shows that computations on outsourcing data are either not supported, or will pose more challenges. Moreover, they have been shown to be poorly suited to digital records because they process each pixel separately. The eventual goal is to propose a simple and efficient technique for handling clients’ data safely. The proposal provides also a mechanism to ensure integrity checking of outsourced data. The novelty of our work is using K-means algorithm and watermarking method to secure cloud services. The implementation results prove that this methodology ensures security and QoS requirements.