Abstract

In the healthcare domain data integrity plays a very huge role and it is basically used to provide the trust on healthcare system by verifying the patients identity and by avoiding the  treatment errors .This research proposes a robust and lightweight encryption framework for medical image protection which, is  a combined version of hash functions and biometric authentication with AES-256 for key generation and also it includes lossy JPEG compression to minimize the transmission overhead. The data integrity is ensured  by computing hash value (SHA-256) before encryption of a medical image and  after decryption and with the original fingerprint derived keys confidentiality and access control are ensured.Experimental evaluation is done on five different medical images to analyse the security system in terms of quality,fidelity,efficiency and the impact of file sizes after encryption.The results after decryption indicates minimum distortion with PSNR of 47.94 dB and SSIM of 0.9954,high efficiency with the key generation time ranged from 362.4 to 621.6 micro seconds and encryption/decryption times remained under 4ms and very minimal file size increase after encryption. The results confirms that the proposed HIBAH(Hybrid Integrity using Biometric Authentication and Hashing) method is more secured,efficient and maintains data integrity,and quality.The future work may focus on light weight cryptography for resource limited environments and also some advanced techniques may add for  error detection and correction in  the  lossy medium.This can also be extended to other data types like patient reports,DICOM metadata etc..and add biometric with another biometric or 2FA to enhance the security and enhancing resistance to adversarial and Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks through additional authentication layers.