A Two-Level Security Layer for Medical Data

Abstract

Implementing a two-level security approach comprising cryptography and steganography in Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems ensures comprehensive protection of sensitive patient information. Cryptography encryption methods alone may not provide adequate protection, as they can be susceptible to attacks and also, steganography, has the visual quality issues after embedding. The combination of RSA cryptography and DWT steganography will offers a comprehensive solution for securing medical data, ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and compliance with privacy regulations, while DWT steganography provides covert embedding within medical images, preserving diagnostic integrity and enhancing data protection. In this paper, a secure two-level layer of medical data security is proposed to encrypt secret information using Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) while the encrypted secret information is embedded using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). The performance of the proposed method was evaluated using Mean Square Error (MSE), Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Normalized Cross-Correlation (NCC) metrics. The results obtained show that our method performs with a value of 0.105 for MSE, 49.713 for PSNR and 0.912 for NCC showing high visual quality and low imperceptibility.