Secret Sharing Scheme to implement medical image security

Abstract

Medical image transmission over local or wide area networks has become popular with the rapid development of the networking technologies. Research on secure medical image transmission reported in the literature has two objectives. Providing integrity and authentication of the transferred image is one the objectives. Hiding electronic patient records on images to both save bandwidth and storage requirement is the other goal. Fragile watermarking techniques are used to satisfy both objectives. However, there are two security issues inherent in these techniques. The first issue is about single medium carrying watermarked image. This renders the method vulnerable since the image cannot be recovered without errors if the medium is corrupted intentionally during transmission. Lack of confidence to a single receipent is the second issue since it may result in a leakage of medical records. Confidentiality is improved if a significant military, political or commercial person's medical records is shared among a number of participants. Secret Sharing Scheme proposed by Shamir in 1979 is used to share medical images and electronic patient records among a number of participants in this paper. Therefore, two security issues about secure transmission of medical images mentioned by researchers in the literature will be eliminated.