Application of Cryptography and Randomized Spatial Domain Steganography for Information Hiding in Medical Images

Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one apart from the intended recipient knows of the existence of the message; this is in contrast to cryptography, where the existence of the message itself is not disguised, but the content is obscured. Medical information about the patient is very sensitive and security solutions are needed to make the information secure during transmission and distribution. This paper proposes an image steganography as a means to hide this secret information inside the image. The proposed method ensures that there is minimal change in the medical image since any degradation will reduce the clinical value of the image. The proposed method encodes the data into the image in a randomized manner. This paper proposes a framework for data embedding using hashing, encryption and randomization, where in other hashing, encryption and randomization techniques can be plugged into the model as per security needs.