Medical Image Security with Cheater Identification Using Secret Sharing Scheme

Abstract

Security of medical images and relevant patient information is a matter of important concern while using public networks for transfer of medical images between patients and clinicians. Clinicians require to confirm the legitimacy of patient medical images for applications such as telediagnosis and teleconsultation. Furthermore, medical image should not be perceivable to unauthorized parties with malicious intentions on the patient’s health. As a result, medical images must be protected with suitable primitives while transferring them over public channel. In this paper, we present a scheme for protecting medical images using a threshold secret sharing scheme. The proposed scheme protects images from unauthorized access and intermediate tampering, thus, ensuring confidentiality and integrity of the shared images and associated patient records. The scheme takes into consideration the possibility of malevolence from any of the participating clinicians and detects and identifies cheating among the clinicians, if any. The proposed scheme is analyzed and simulated with electronic patient records and the experimental results satisfy all the properties of the scheme.