Security of medical images over insecure communication channels using zero-steganography

Abstract

Secure and private communication has gained much focus on the international arena recently due to the ability of certain organizations to eavesdrop on private communication. This ability is further increased in the Internet of Medical Things scenario where medical images and private data are shared over insecure channels. This work is focused on a new and exciting question related to medical image steganography: is it possible to send hidden information through a cover medium, that is a medical image, without making any alteration to the cover medium in an effective manner? The proposed work has shown that it is possible to send hidden information through a medical image without making any alteration to the original medical image. This solves two problems at the same time. The first problem is that privacy and security approaches that depend on watermarking and steganography usually need some sort of modification to the medical images. The second is the knowledge that there is steganography taking place is completely hidden as no change is made to the medical image. Experiments have shown that the proposed approach under investigation demonstrates effective robustness against attacks like filtering, compression, and addition of noise.