Securing Medical Images using Encryption and LSB Steganography

Medical imaging plays a vital role in the healthcare industry. Due to the advancements in the healthcare industry medical images are being transferred between geographically spread regions. As the medical images are transmitted through public networks several security challenges may arise such as authentication, integrity, and confidentiality. In this paper, the research focus is on preserving the confidentiality and integrity of the medical images. In general, integrity and confidentiality can be achieved by encryption (a piece of cryptography). To incorporate one more layer of security, steganography is applied to the medical image. In this paper, a one-time pad encryption algorithm is used to encrypt the medical image, then the encrypted image is implanted into a cover image to give a stego image making the system more resilient to the attacker. Further in this paper, the above said method is being implemented using MATLAB and the experimental results are compared with hiding the medical image using LSB steganography without encryption (one layer of security). Various formats of medical images have been taken into consideration such as DICOM, TIFF, BMP, and JPEG. Results show that the combination of encryption and steganography performs better than applying only steganography, concerning MSE and PSNR values.