Reyad Omar, Karar Mohamed Esmail
College of Computing and Information Technology, Shaqra University, Shaqra, Saudi Arabia.
Faculty of Science, Sohag University, Sohag, 82524 Egypt.
Arab J Sci Eng. 2021;46(4):3581-3593. doi: 10.1007/s13369-020-05196-w. Epub 2021 Jan 5.
The task of preserving patient data is becoming more sophisticated with the evolution of technology and its integration with the medical sector in the form of telemedicine and electronic health (e-health). Secured medical image transmission requires adequate techniques for protecting patient privacy. This study aims at encrypting Coronavirus (COVID-19) images of Computed Tomography (CT) chest scan into cipherimages for secure real-world data transmission of infected patients. Provably safe pseudo-random generators are used for the production of a "key-stream" to achieve high privacy of patient data. The Blum Blum Shub (BBS) generator is a powerful generator of pseudo-random bit-strings. In this article, a hashing version of BBS, namely Hash-BBS (HBBS) generator, is presented to exploit the benefits of a hash function to reinforce the integrity of extracted binary sequences for creating multiple key-streams. The NIST-test-suite has been used to analyze and verify the statistical properties of resulted key bit-strings of all tested operations. The obtained bit-strings showed good randomness properties; consequently, uniform distributed binary sequence was achieved over the key length. Based on the obtained key-streams, an encryption scheme of four COVID-19 CT-images is proposed and designed to attain a high grade of confidentiality and integrity in transmission of medical data. In addition, a comprehensive performance analysis was done using different evaluation metrics. The evaluation results of this study demonstrated that the proposed key-stream generator outperforms the other security methods of previous studies. Therefore, it can be successfully applied to satisfy security requirements of transmitting CT-images for COVID-19 patients.
随着技术的发展及其以远程医疗和电子健康（e-Health）的形式与医疗领域的整合，保护患者数据的任务变得越来越复杂。安全的医学图像传输需要适当的技术来保护患者隐私。本研究旨在将计算机断层扫描（CT）胸部扫描的冠状病毒（COVID-19）图像加密为密文图像，以实现感染患者真实世界数据的安全传输。可证明安全的伪随机生成器用于生成“密钥流”，以实现患者数据的高度隐私性。布卢姆·布卢姆·舒布（BBS）生成器是一种强大的伪随机位串生成器。在本文中，提出了一种BBS的哈希版本，即哈希-BBS（HBBS）生成器，以利用哈希函数的优势来增强提取的二进制序列的完整性，从而创建多个密钥流。国家标准与技术研究院（NIST）测试套件已用于分析和验证所有测试操作所产生的密钥位串的统计特性。所获得的位串显示出良好的随机性；因此，在密钥长度上实现了均匀分布的二进制序列。基于所获得的密钥流，提出并设计了一种针对四张COVID-19 CT图像的加密方案，以在医学数据传输中实现高度的机密性和完整性。此外，使用不同的评估指标进行了全面的性能分析。本研究的评估结果表明，所提出的密钥流生成器优于先前研究的其他安全方法。因此，它可以成功应用于满足COVID-19患者CT图像传输的安全要求。
