Optimization of medical image steganography using n-decomposition genetic algorithm

Protecting patients' confidential information is a critical concern in medical image steganography. The Least Significant Bits (LSB) technique has been widely used for secure communication. However, it is susceptible to imperceptibility and security risks due to the direct manipulation of pixels, and ASCII patterns present limitations. Consequently, sensitive medical information is subject to loss or alteration. Despite attempts to optimize LSB, these issues persist due to (1) the formulation of the optimization suffering from non-valid implicit constraints, causing inflexibility in reaching optimal embedding, (2) lacking convergence in the searching process, where the message length significantly affects the size of the solution space, and (3) issues of application customizability where different data require more flexibility in controlling the embedding process. To overcome these limitations, this study proposes a technique known as an n-decomposition genetic algorithm. This algorithm uses a variable-length search to identify the best location to embed the secret message by incorporating constraints to avoid local minimum traps. The methodology consists of five main phases: (1) initial investigation, (2) formulating an embedding scheme, (3) constructing a decomposition scheme, (4) integrating the schemes' design into the proposed technique, and (5) evaluating the proposed technique's performance based on parameters using medical datasets from kaggle.com. The proposed technique showed resistance to statistical analysis evaluated using Reversible Statistical (RS) analysis and histogram. It also demonstrated its superiority in imperceptibility and security measured by MSE and PSNR to Chest and Retina datasets (0.0557, 0.0550) and (60.6696, 60.7287), respectively. Still, compared to the results obtained by the proposed technique, the benchmark outperforms the Brain dataset due to the homogeneous nature of the images and the extensive black background. This research has contributed to genetic-based decomposition in medical image steganography and provides a technique that offers improved security without compromising efficiency and convergence. However, further validation is required to determine its effectiveness in real-world applications

Medical image encryption techniques: a technical survey and potential challenges

Among the most sensitive and important data in telemedicine systems are medical images. It is necessary to use a robust encryption method that is resistant to cryptographic assaults while transferring medical images over the internet. Confidentiality is the most crucial of the three security goals for protecting information systems, along with availability, integrity, and compliance. Encryption and watermarking of medical images address problems with confidentiality and integrity in telemedicine applications. The need to prioritize security issues in telemedicine applications makes the choice of a trustworthy and efficient strategy or framework all the more crucial. The paper examines various security issues and cutting-edge methods to secure medical images for use with telemedicine systems

Robust Watermarking through Dual Band IWT and Chinese Remainder Theorem

CRT was a widely used algorithm in the development of watermarking methods. The algorithm produced good image quality but it had low robustness against compression and filtering. This paper proposed a new watermarking scheme through dual band IWT to improve the robustness and preserving the image quality. The high frequency sub band was used to index the embedding location on the low frequency sub band. In robustness test, the CRT method resulted average NC value of 0.7129, 0.4846, and 0.6768 while the proposed method had higher NC value of 0.7902, 0.7473, and 0.8163 in corresponding Gaussian filter, JPEG, and JPEG2000 compression test. Meanwhile the both CRT and proposed method had similar average SSIM value of 0.9979 and 0.9960 respectively in term of image quality. The result showed that the proposed method was able to improve the robustness and maintaining the image quality

Watermarking for the Secure Transmission of the Key into an Encrypted Image

Ensuring the confidentiality of any data exchanged always presents a great concern for all communication instances. Technically, encryption is the ideal solution for this task. However, this process must deal with the progress of the cryptanalysis that aims to disclose the information exchanged. The risk increases due to the need for a dual transmission that includes the encrypted medium and the decryption key. In a context of chaotic encryption of images, we propose to insert the decryption key into the encrypted image using image watermarking. Thus, only the watermarked encrypted image will be transmitted. Upon reception, the recipient extracts the key and decrypts the image. The cryptosystem proposed is based on an encryption using a dynamic Look-Up Table issued from a chaotic generator. The obtained results prove the efficiency of our method to ensure a secure exchange of images and keys

Fast image watermarking based on signum of cosine matrix

In the field of image watermarking, the singular value decomposition has good imperceptibility and robustness, but it has high complexity. It divides a host image into matrices of U, S, and V. Singular matrix S has been widely used for embedding and extracting watermark, while orthogonal matrices of U and V are used in decomposition and reconstruction. The proposed signum of cosine matrix method is carried out to eliminate the generation of the three matrices at each block and replace it with a signum of cosine matrix. The proposed signum of cosine matrix is performed faster on the decomposition and reconstruction. The image is transformed into a coefficient matrix C using the signum matrix. The C matrix values are closer to the S value of singular value decomposition which can preserve high quality of the watermarked image. The experimental results show that our method is able to produce similar imperceptibility and robustness level of the watermarked image with less computational time

Security and imperceptibility improving of image steganography using pixel allocation and random function techniques

Information security is one of the main aspects of processes and methodologies in the technical age of information and communication. The security of information should be a key priority in the secret exchange of information between two parties. In order to ensure the security of information, there are some strategies that are used, and they include steganography and cryptography. An effective digital image-steganographic method based on odd/even pixel allocation and random function to increase the security and imperceptibility has been improved. This lately developed outline has been verified for increasing the security and imperceptibility to determine the existent problems. Huffman coding has been used to modify secret data prior embedding stage; this modified equivalent secret data that prevent the secret data from attackers to increase the secret data capacities. The main objective of our scheme is to boost the peak-signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR) of the stego cover and stop against any attack. The size of the secret data also increases. The results confirm good PSNR values in addition of these findings confirmed the proposed method eligibility

IPV6 BLOCKCHAIN DATA COMMUNICATION FOR UAV SWARM-INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS BASED ON PEER-TO-PEER, PEER-TO-MANY, AND MANY-TO-PEER SCENARIOS

This thesis explores the use of blockchains along with the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) data packet messages to support secure, high-performance, and scalable communication with an intelligent swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). For this thesis, we investigate the exchange of encrypted data packets for three scenarios, those being peer-to-peer, peer-to-many, and many-to-peer. We simulate the swarm’s behavior for each of these scenarios and vary the number of UAVs in a swarm over the simulation runs. The simulation-based results showed that for peer-to-peer scenarios and many-to-peer scenarios, there is no significant increase in latency even though in many-to-peer scenarios, the number of interacting nodes increases. In contrast, latency increases for the peer-to-many scenarios. Additional research needs to be performed to assess the security and scalability of the blockchain-IPv6 approach proposed in this thesis.Major, Indonesian NavyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

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