Real-Time Watermarking of Medical Images and Secure Transmission Through Steganography

Biswas, A.; Indu, P.; Bhattacharyya, S.

Medical images and reports are highly confidential information and should not be leaked, or modified in any circumstances. Healthcare organizations constantly face cyber-attacks with the motive of stealing medical information for their personal gains, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the attacks have almost doubled. Encrypting medical information and transmitting them over a secure channel ensures the confidentiality of information, however, can be stolen and decrypted later. Also, most of the health organization lacks in terms of security and privacy of their patient’s information. A real-time watermarking and steganography protocol can mitigate the aftermath of a cyber-attack by hiding confidential reports into useless looking files such as log files and user manuals as soon the reports are generated. We propose a secure steganographic medical report system that can hide medical reports as well as identify fake ones. The system uses real-time watermarking during report generation which prevents any kind of modification;thereafter, these data are transmitted/stored using a secure steganography protocol. Finally, the data is retrieved by doctors or health workers after stego-extraction and watermark verification. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.