Protection of COVID-19 images using multiple elliptic curve cryptography

Abstract

ABSTRACT COVID-19 pandemic has made the medical industry around the world under unprecedented and growing pressure. To preserve the integrity and protection of medical data for transmission and for secure diagnosis, this work suggests an encryption method for the protection of privacy of COVID-19 patient’s data by securing medical images based on elliptic curve cryptography. This is done through amalgamating three different types of stages by using elliptic curve cryptography. First, the coordinates of pixels of medical images are scrambled using elliptic curve and encrypt the coordinates of pixels, which help in decreasing the correlation between the image’s pixels. The second stage empowers the first stage by encrypting the group of pixels from previous outputs irrespective whether the pixel value lies on the curve or not based on the multiplication modulo operation of elliptic curve cryptography. Finally, the group of pixels from the previous output is encrypted by XORing with the key generated from ECC DHKE (Elliptic Curve Cryptography Diffie–Hellman Key Exchange). The NIST test suite examines and verifies the statistical characteristics of the binary sequences for bits and bits that are created by cryptographic random or pseudorandom number generators. The outcomes of the experiments indicate how the suggested approach satisfies the security requirements of COVID-19 images of patients in terms of high effectiveness in encryption quality, resilient against many statistical analyses and attacks and also performs better than some recent schemes. This work also evaluated comparisons of quantitative, differential, time consumptions and computational complexity with several recent schemes.