An optimal elliptic curve cryptography based encryption algorithm for blockchain-enabled medical image transmission

Abstract

In recent times, a number of Internet of Things (IoT) related healthcare applications have been deployed for automating healthcare services and offering easy accessibility to patients. Several issues like security, fault-tolerant, and reliability have restricted the utilization of IoT services in real-time healthcare environments. To achieve security, blockchain technology can be utilized which offers effective interoperability of healthcare databases, ease of medical data access, device tracking, prescription database, hospital assets, etc. Therefore, this paper presents an optimal Elliptic curve cryptography-based encryption algorithm for a blockchain-enabled medical image transmission model, named OECC-BMIT. The presented OECC-BMIT model involves different stages of operations such as encryption, optimal key generation, blockchain-enabled data transmission, and decryption. Firstly, the OECC-BMIT model performs Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) based encryption technique to securely transmit the medical images. In order to generate the optimal set of keys for the ECC technique, modified bat optimization (MBO) algorithm is applied. Then, the encrypted images undergo secure transmission via blockchain technology. The encrypted images are decrypted on the recipient side and the original medical image is reconstructed effectively. Extensive sets of experimentations were performed to highlight the goodness of the OECC-BMIT algorithm and the obtained results pointed out the improved outcome over the state of art methods in terms of different measures.