Confidentiality, integrity and authentication of DICOM medical images

Abstract

Due to the security threats during transmission of any data, exchange of medical images should be done in a protective manner. This has activated the need for confidentiality, authentication, and integrity of medical images. The confidentiality of header data is achieved from medical image exchange standard but for the pixel information it is not achieved. The pixel information achieves authentication and integrity but the header data does not. In this paper, a crypto-oriented algorithm is proposed which offers confidentially, authentication, and integrity for the header and pixel data. AES-GCM (Advanced encryption Standard-Galois counter mode) and Whirlpool hash function are used for achieving these requirements. Simulations are carried out in order to show that confidentiality, authentication, and integrity have been accomplished by the numerical results of entropy, histogram analysis, and correlation.