Utilization of HEVC ChaCha20-based selective encryption for secure telehealth video conferencing

Abstract

Coronavirus (COVID-19) is a contagious disease that causes exceptional effect on healthcare organizations worldwide with dangerous impact on medical services within the hospitals. Because of the fast spread of COVID-19, the healthcare facilities could be a big source of disease infection. So, healthcare video consultations should be used to decrease face-to-face communication between clinician and patients. Healthcare video consultations may be beneficial for some COVID-19 conditions and reduce the need for face-to-face contact with a potentially positive patient without symptoms. These conditions are like top clinicians who provide remote consultations to develop treatment methodology and follow-up remotely, patients who consult about COVID-19, and those who have mild symptoms suggestive of the COVID-19 virus. Video consultations are a supplement to, and not a substitute for, telephone consultations. It may also form part of a broader COVID-19 distance care strategy that contains computerized screening, separation of possibly infectious patients within medical services, and computerized video-intensive observing of their intensive care that helps reduce mixing. Nowadays, the spread of the COVID-19 virus helps to expand the use of video healthcare consultations because it helps to exchange experiences and remote medical consultations, save costs and health procedures used to cope with the pandemic of the COVID-19 virus, and monitor the progress of treatment plans, moment by moment from a distance with precision, clarity and ease. From this perspective, this paper introduces a high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) ChaCha20-based selective encryption (SE) scheme for secure healthcare video Consultations. The proposed HEVC ChaCha20-based SE scheme uses the ChaCha20 for encrypting the sign bits of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Motion Vector Difference (MVD) in the HEVC entropy phase. The main achievement of HEVC ChaCha20-based SE scheme is encrypting the most sensitive video bits with keeping low delay time, fixed bit rate of the HEVC, and format compliance. Experimental tests guarantee that the proposed HEVC ChaCha20-based SE scheme can ensure the confidentiality of the healthcare video consultations which has become easy to transmit through the internet.