Blockchain based medical image encryption using Arnold's cat map in a cloud environment

Sci Rep. 2024 Mar 7;14(1):5678. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-56364-z.

Abstract

Improved software for processing medical images has inspired tremendous interest in modern medicine in recent years. Modern healthcare equipment generates huge amounts of data, such as scanned medical images and computerized patient information, which must be secured for future use. Diversity in the healthcare industry, namely in the form of medical data, is one of the largest challenges for researchers. Cloud environment and the Block chain technology have both demonstrated their own use. The purpose of this study is to combine both technologies for safe and secure transaction. Storing or sending medical data through public clouds exposes information into potential eavesdropping, data breaches and unauthorized access. Encrypting data before transmission is crucial to mitigate these security risks. As a result, a Blockchain based Chaotic Arnold's cat map Encryption Scheme (BCAES) is proposed in this paper. The BCAES first encrypts the image using Arnold's cat map encryption scheme and then sends the encrypted image into Cloud Server and stores the signed document of plain image into blockchain. As blockchain is often considered more secure due to its distributed nature and consensus mechanism, data receiver will ensure data integrity and authenticity of image after decryption using signed document stored into the blockchain. Various analysis techniques have been used to examine the proposed scheme. The results of analysis like key sensitivity analysis, key space analysis, Information Entropy, histogram correlation of adjacent pixels, Number of Pixel Change Rate, Peak Signal Noise Ratio, Unified Average Changing Intensity, and similarity analysis like Mean Square Error, and Structural Similarity Index Measure illustrated that our proposed scheme is an efficient encryption scheme as compared to some recent literature. Our current achievements surpass all previous endeavors, setting a new standard of excellence.

Keywords: Arnold’s cat map; Blockchain; Cloud computing; Orthogonal matrix; Structural similarity index measure (SSIM).