Robust watermarking algorithm for medical volume data in internet of medical things

The advancement of 5G technology, big data and cloud storage has promoted the rapid development of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). Based on the strict security requirements and high level of accuracy required for disease diagnosis and pathological analysis, 3D medical volume data have been created in large numbers. The IoMT facilitates the rapid transfer of medical information and also makes the protection of pathological information and privacy information of patients increasingly prominent. To solve the security problem, a robust zero-watermarking algorithm based on 3D hyperchaos and 3D dual-tree complex wavelet transform is proposed according to the selected feature of medical volume data. The feature combines human visual features with improved perceptual hashing techniques. It is a robust and efficient binary sequence. When implementing the proposed algorithm, the watermark is first scrambled with 3D hyperchaos to enhance security. Then, 3D DTCWT-DCT transformation is applied to medical volume data, and the low-frequency coefficients that can represent the features are selected and binarized to generate the secret key to complete the watermark embedding and extraction. Zero embedding and blind extraction ensure that the original medical volume data is not altered in any form, which meets the special requirements for diagnosis. Simulation results show that the algorithm is robust and can effectively resist common attacks and geometric attacks. It used fewer robust features to effectively bound medical volume data and watermark information, saved bandwidth, and satisfied the security of transmission and storage of medical volume data in the Internet of medical things. In particular, compared with state-of-the-art technology, the proposed algorithm improves the average NC value by 46.67% under geometric attacks

A Comprehensive Review on Medical Image Steganography Based on LSB Technique and Potential Challenges

The rapid development of telemedicine services and the requirements for exchanging medical information between physicians, consultants, and health institutions have made the protection of patients’ information an important priority for any future e-health system. The protection of medical information, including the cover (i.e. medical image), has a specificity that slightly differs from the requirements for protecting other information. It is necessary to preserve the cover greatly due to its importance on the reception side as medical staff use this information to provide a diagnosis to save a patient's life. If the cover is tampered with, this leads to failure in achieving the goal of telemedicine. Therefore, this work provides an investigation of information security techniques in medical imaging, focusing on security goals. Encrypting a message before hiding them gives an extra layer of security, and thus, will provide an excellent solution to protect the sensitive information of patients during the sharing of medical information. Medical image steganography is a special case of image steganography, while Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) is the backbone of all medical imaging divisions, whereby it is most broadly used to store and transmit medical images. The main objective of this study is to provide a general idea of what Least Significant Bit-based (LSB) steganography techniques have achieved in medical images

Wireless body area network revisited

Rapid growth of wireless body area networks (WBANs) technology allowed the fast and secured acquisition as well as exchange of vast amount of data information in diversified fields. WBANs intend to simplify and improve the speed, accuracy, and reliability of communica-tions from sensors (interior motors) placed on and/or close to the human body, reducing the healthcare cost remarkably. However, the secu-rity of sensitive data transfer using WBANs and subsequent protection from adversaries attack is a major issue. Depending on the types of applications, small and high sensitive sensors having several nodes obtained from invasive/non-invasive micro- and nano- technology can be installed on the human body to capture useful information. Lately, the use of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and integrated circuits in wireless communications (WCs) became widespread because of their low-power operation, intelligence, accuracy, and miniaturi-zation. IEEE 802.15.6 and 802.15.4j standards have already been set to specifically regulate the medical networks and WBANs. In this view, present communication provides an all-inclusive overview of the past development, recent progress, challenges and future trends of security technology related to WBANs

Design of a secure architecture for the exchange of biomedical information in m-Health scenarios

El paradigma de m-Salud (salud móvil) aboga por la integración masiva de las más avanzadas tecnologías de comunicación, red móvil y sensores en aplicaciones y sistemas de salud, para fomentar el despliegue de un nuevo modelo de atención clínica centrada en el usuario/paciente. Este modelo tiene por objetivos el empoderamiento de los usuarios en la gestión de su propia salud (p.ej. aumentando sus conocimientos, promocionando estilos de vida saludable y previniendo enfermedades), la prestación de una mejor tele-asistencia sanitaria en el hogar para ancianos y pacientes crónicos y una notable disminución del gasto de los Sistemas de Salud gracias a la reducción del número y la duración de las hospitalizaciones. No obstante, estas ventajas, atribuidas a las aplicaciones de m-Salud, suelen venir acompañadas del requisito de un alto grado de disponibilidad de la información biomédica de sus usuarios para garantizar una alta calidad de servicio, p.ej. fusionar varias señales de un usuario para obtener un diagnóstico más preciso. La consecuencia negativa de cumplir esta demanda es el aumento directo de las superficies potencialmente vulnerables a ataques, lo que sitúa a la seguridad (y a la privacidad) del modelo de m-Salud como factor crítico para su éxito. Como requisito no funcional de las aplicaciones de m-Salud, la seguridad ha recibido menos atención que otros requisitos técnicos que eran más urgentes en etapas de desarrollo previas, tales como la robustez, la eficiencia, la interoperabilidad o la usabilidad. Otro factor importante que ha contribuido a retrasar la implementación de políticas de seguridad sólidas es que garantizar un determinado nivel de seguridad implica unos costes que pueden ser muy relevantes en varias dimensiones, en especial en la económica (p.ej. sobrecostes por la inclusión de hardware extra para la autenticación de usuarios), en el rendimiento (p.ej. reducción de la eficiencia y de la interoperabilidad debido a la integración de elementos de seguridad) y en la usabilidad (p.ej. configuración más complicada de dispositivos y aplicaciones de salud debido a las nuevas opciones de seguridad). Por tanto, las soluciones de seguridad que persigan satisfacer a todos los actores del contexto de m-Salud (usuarios, pacientes, personal médico, personal técnico, legisladores, fabricantes de dispositivos y equipos, etc.) deben ser robustas y al mismo tiempo minimizar sus costes asociados. Esta Tesis detalla una propuesta de seguridad, compuesta por cuatro grandes bloques interconectados, para dotar de seguridad a las arquitecturas de m-Salud con unos costes reducidos. El primer bloque define un esquema global que proporciona unos niveles de seguridad e interoperabilidad acordes con las características de las distintas aplicaciones de m-Salud. Este esquema está compuesto por tres capas diferenciadas, diseñadas a la medidas de los dominios de m-Salud y de sus restricciones, incluyendo medidas de seguridad adecuadas para la defensa contra las amenazas asociadas a sus aplicaciones de m-Salud. El segundo bloque establece la extensión de seguridad de aquellos protocolos estándar que permiten la adquisición, el intercambio y/o la administración de información biomédica -- por tanto, usados por muchas aplicaciones de m-Salud -- pero no reúnen los niveles de seguridad detallados en el esquema previo. Estas extensiones se concretan para los estándares biomédicos ISO/IEEE 11073 PHD y SCP-ECG. El tercer bloque propone nuevas formas de fortalecer la seguridad de los tests biomédicos, que constituyen el elemento esencial de muchas aplicaciones de m-Salud de carácter clínico, mediante codificaciones novedosas. Finalmente el cuarto bloque, que se sitúa en paralelo a los anteriores, selecciona herramientas genéricas de seguridad (elementos de autenticación y criptográficos) cuya integración en los otros bloques resulta idónea, y desarrolla nuevas herramientas de seguridad, basadas en señal -- embedding y keytagging --, para reforzar la protección de los test biomédicos.The paradigm of m-Health (mobile health) advocates for the massive integration of advanced mobile communications, network and sensor technologies in healthcare applications and systems to foster the deployment of a new, user/patient-centered healthcare model enabling the empowerment of users in the management of their health (e.g. by increasing their health literacy, promoting healthy lifestyles and the prevention of diseases), a better home-based healthcare delivery for elderly and chronic patients and important savings for healthcare systems due to the reduction of hospitalizations in number and duration. It is a fact that many m-Health applications demand high availability of biomedical information from their users (for further accurate analysis, e.g. by fusion of various signals) to guarantee high quality of service, which on the other hand entails increasing the potential surfaces for attacks. Therefore, it is not surprising that security (and privacy) is commonly included among the most important barriers for the success of m-Health. As a non-functional requirement for m-Health applications, security has received less attention than other technical issues that were more pressing at earlier development stages, such as reliability, eficiency, interoperability or usability. Another fact that has contributed to delaying the enforcement of robust security policies is that guaranteeing a certain security level implies costs that can be very relevant and that span along diferent dimensions. These include budgeting (e.g. the demand of extra hardware for user authentication), performance (e.g. lower eficiency and interoperability due to the addition of security elements) and usability (e.g. cumbersome configuration of devices and applications due to security options). Therefore, security solutions that aim to satisfy all the stakeholders in the m-Health context (users/patients, medical staff, technical staff, systems and devices manufacturers, regulators, etc.) shall be robust and, at the same time, minimize their associated costs. This Thesis details a proposal, composed of four interrelated blocks, to integrate appropriate levels of security in m-Health architectures in a cost-efcient manner. The first block designes a global scheme that provides different security and interoperability levels accordingto how critical are the m-Health applications to be implemented. This consists ofthree layers tailored to the m-Health domains and their constraints, whose security countermeasures defend against the threats of their associated m-Health applications. Next, the second block addresses the security extension of those standard protocols that enable the acquisition, exchange and/or management of biomedical information | thus, used by many m-Health applications | but do not meet the security levels described in the former scheme. These extensions are materialized for the biomedical standards ISO/IEEE 11073 PHD and SCP-ECG. Then, the third block proposes new ways of enhancing the security of biomedical standards, which are the centerpiece of many clinical m-Health applications, by means of novel codings. Finally the fourth block, with is parallel to the others, selects generic security methods (for user authentication and cryptographic protection) whose integration in the other blocks results optimal, and also develops novel signal-based methods (embedding and keytagging) for strengthening the security of biomedical tests. The layer-based extensions of the standards ISO/IEEE 11073 PHD and SCP-ECG can be considered as robust, cost-eficient and respectful with their original features and contents. The former adds no attributes to its data information model, four new frames to the service model |and extends four with new sub-frames|, and only one new sub-state to the communication model. Furthermore, a lightweight architecture consisting of a personal health device mounting a 9 MHz processor and an aggregator mounting a 1 GHz processor is enough to transmit a 3-lead electrocardiogram in real-time implementing the top security layer. The extra requirements associated to this extension are an initial configuration of the health device and the aggregator, tokens for identification/authentication of users if these devices are to be shared and the implementation of certain IHE profiles in the aggregator to enable the integration of measurements in healthcare systems. As regards to the extension of SCP-ECG, it only adds a new section with selected security elements and syntax in order to protect the rest of file contents and provide proper role-based access control. The overhead introduced in the protected SCP-ECG is typically 2{13 % of the regular file size, and the extra delays to protect a newly generated SCP-ECG file and to access it for interpretation are respectively a 2{10 % and a 5 % of the regular delays. As regards to the signal-based security techniques developed, the embedding method is the basis for the proposal of a generic coding for tests composed of biomedical signals, periodic measurements and contextual information. This has been adjusted and evaluated with electrocardiogram and electroencephalogram-based tests, proving the objective clinical quality of the coded tests, the capacity of the coding-access system to operate in real-time (overall delays of 2 s for electrocardiograms and 3.3 s for electroencephalograms) and its high usability. Despite of the embedding of security and metadata to enable m-Health services, the compression ratios obtained by this coding range from ' 3 in real-time transmission to ' 5 in offline operation. Complementarily, keytagging permits associating information to images (and other signals) by means of keys in a secure and non-distorting fashion, which has been availed to implement security measures such as image authentication, integrity control and location of tampered areas, private captioning with role-based access control, traceability and copyright protection. The tests conducted indicate a remarkable robustness-capacity tradeoff that permits implementing all this measures simultaneously, and the compatibility of keytagging with JPEG2000 compression, maintaining this tradeoff while setting the overall keytagging delay in only ' 120 ms for any image size | evidencing the scalability of this technique. As a general conclusion, it has been demonstrated and illustrated with examples that there are various, complementary and structured manners to contribute in the implementation of suitable security levels for m-Health architectures with a moderate cost in budget, performance, interoperability and usability. The m-Health landscape is evolving permanently along all their dimensions, and this Thesis aims to do so with its security. Furthermore, the lessons learned herein may offer further guidance for the elaboration of more comprehensive and updated security schemes, for the extension of other biomedical standards featuring low emphasis on security or privacy, and for the improvement of the state of the art regarding signal-based protection methods and applications

Edge-centric multimodal authentication system using encrypted biometric templates

Data security, complete system control, and missed storage and computing opportunities in personal portable devices are some of the major limitations of the centralized cloud environment. Among these limitations, security is a prime concern due to potential unauthorized access to private data. Biometrics, in particular, is considered sensitive data, and its usage is subject to the privacy protection law. To address this issue, a multimodal authentication system using encrypted biometrics for the edge-centric cloud environment is proposed in this study. Personal portable devices are utilized for encrypting biometrics in the proposed system, which optimizes the use of resources and tackles another limitation of the cloud environment. Biometrics is encrypted using a new method. In the proposed system, the edges transmit the encrypted speech and face for processing in the cloud. The cloud then decrypts the biometrics and performs authentication to confirm the identity of an individual. The model for speech authentication is based on two types of features, namely, Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and perceptual linear prediction coefficients. The model for face authentication is implemented by determining the eigenfaces. The final decision about the identity of a user is based on majority voting. Experimental results show that the new encryption method can reliably hide the identity of an individual and accurately decrypt the biometrics, which is vital for errorless authentication

DIGITAL WATERMARKING OF 3D MEDICAL VISUAL OBJECTS

At present, medical equipment provides often 3D models of scanning organs instead of ordinary 2D images. This concept is supported by Digital Imaging and COmmunications in Medicine (DICOM) standard available for telemedicine. This means that the confidential information under transmission ought to be protected by special techniques, particularly digital watermarking scheme instead of textual informative files represented, for example, on CD disks. We propose a multilevel protection, for which a fragile watermark is the first level of protection. The Region Of Interest (ROI) watermark and textual watermarks with information about patient and study (the last ones can be combines as a single textual watermark) form the second level of protection. Encryption of the ROI and textual watermarks using Arnold’s transform is the third level of protection. In the case of 3D models, we find the ROI in each of 2D sliced images, apply the digital wavelet transform or digital shearlet transform (depending on the volume of watermarks) for the ROI and textual watermarks embedding, and embed a fragile watermark using digital Hadamard transform. The main task is to find the relevant regions for embedding. To this and, we develop the original algorithm for selecting relevant regions. The obtained results confirm the robustness of our approach for rotation, scaling, translation, and JPEG attacks

Triple scheme based on image steganography to improve imperceptibility and security

A foremost priority in the information technology and communication era is achieving an effective and secure steganography scheme when considering information hiding. Commonly, the digital images are used as the cover for the steganography owing to their redundancy in the representation, making them hidden to the intruders. Nevertheless, any steganography system launched over the internet can be attacked upon recognizing the stego cover. Presently, the design and development of an effective image steganography system are facing several challenging issues including the low capacity, poor security, and imperceptibility. Towards overcoming the aforementioned issues, a new decomposition scheme was proposed for image steganography with a new approach known as a Triple Number Approach (TNA). In this study, three main stages were used to achieve objectives and overcome the issues of image steganography, beginning with image and text preparation, followed by embedding and culminating in extraction. Finally, the evaluation stage employed several evaluations in order to benchmark the results. Different contributions were presented with this study. The first contribution was a Triple Text Coding Method (TTCM), which was related to the preparation of secret messages prior to the embedding process. The second contribution was a Triple Embedding Method (TEM), which was related to the embedding process. The third contribution was related to security criteria which were based on a new partitioning of an image known as the Image Partitioning Method (IPM). The IPM proposed a random pixel selection, based on image partitioning into three phases with three iterations of the Hénon Map function. An enhanced Huffman coding algorithm was utilized to compress the secret message before TTCM process. A standard dataset from the Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI) containing color and grayscale images with 512 x 512 pixels were utilised in this study. Different parameters were used to test the performance of the proposed scheme based on security and imperceptibility (image quality). In image quality, four important measurements that were used are Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), Mean Square Error (MSE) and Histogram analysis. Whereas, two security measurements that were used are Human Visual System (HVS) and Chi-square (X2) attacks. In terms of PSNR and SSIM, the Lena grayscale image obtained results were 78.09 and 1 dB, respectively. Meanwhile, the HVS and X2 attacks obtained high results when compared to the existing scheme in the literature. Based on the findings, the proposed scheme give evidence to increase capacity, imperceptibility, and security to overcome existing issues

SLEPX: An Efficient Lightweight Cipher for Visual Protection of Scalable HEVC Extension

This paper proposes a lightweight cipher scheme aimed at the scalable extension of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) codec, referred to as the Scalable HEVC (SHVC) standard. This stream cipher, Symmetric Cipher for Lightweight Encryption based on Permutation and EXlusive OR (SLEPX), applies Selective Encryption (SE) over suitable coding syntax elements in the SHVC layers. This is achieved minimal computational complexity and delay. The algorithm also conserves most SHVC functionalities, i.e. preservation of bit-length, decoder format-compliance, and error resilience. For comparative analysis, results were taken and compared with other state-of-art ciphers i.e. Exclusive-OR (XOR) and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). The performance of SLEPX is also compared with existing video SE solutions to confirm the efficiency of the adopted scheme. The experimental results demonstrate that SLEPX is as secure as AES in terms of visual protection, while computationally efficient comparable with a basic XOR cipher. Visual quality assessment, security analysis and extensive cryptanalysis (based on numerical values of selected binstrings) also showed the effectiveness of SLEPX’s visual protection scheme for SHVC compared to previously-employed cryptographic technique