Secure IoT-enabled sharing of digital medical records: An integrated approach with reversible data hiding, symmetric cryptosystem, and IPFS

Abstract

In the digitizing medical field, secure sharing of patients’ medical records over the Internet while preserving privacy is critical. Medical image encryption safeguards healthcare, IoMT, and cloud services from increasing digital threats. Incorporating vital diagnostic data like blood pressure, haemoglobin levels, sugar levels, body temperature, and medical images such as X-rays, CT, and MRI scans, comprehensive medical records benefit from Internet of Things (IoT) technology. This research paper presents a secure solution for sharing medical records among medical experts. The system employs the tamper-proof InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for secure storage and distribution. It establishes a cryptographic association between medical reports and images, enabling secure outsourcing and retrieval by authorized users. This is achieved through the use of the reversible data hiding technique based on the Parametric Binary Tree Labeling (PBTL) scheme, efficiently linking Medical Reports and Images. To ensure robust security, the Medical Report in PDF format is encrypted using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256) for symmetric encryption, and the encrypted file is securely uploaded to IPFS, generating a hash value serving as a reliable reference for future use. Furthermore, IPFS treats the hash value as confidential information and embeds it into the medical image using a novel Algorithm to embed secrets. Subsequently, the embedded image undergoes encryption before being uploaded to IPFS. The extensive evaluation and comparison with existing systems affirm the effectiveness of the proposed method in ensuring security and privacy preservation. Various analyses, including image quality, sensitivity, security, correlation, quality, and attack robustness, demonstrate the efficiency and strength of the proposed approach.