An Image Feature Extraction to Generate a Key for Encryption in Cyber Security Medical Environments

Abstract

Cyber security is a term utilized for describing a collection of technologies, procedures, and practices that try protecting an online environment of a user or an organization. For medical images among most important and delicate data kinds in computer systems, the medical reasons require that all patient data, including images, be encrypted before being transferred over computer networks by healthcare companies. This paper presents a new direction of the encryption method research by encrypting the image based on the domain of the feature extracted to generate a key for the encryption process. The encryption process is started by applying edges detection. After dividing the bits of the edge image into (3×3) windows, the diffusions on bits are applied to create a key used for encrypting the edge image. Four randomness tests are passed through NIST randomness tests to ensure whether the generated key is accepted as true. This process is reversible in the state of decryption to retrieve the original image. The encryption image that will be gained can be used in any cyber security field such as healthcare organization. The comparative experiments prove that the proposed algorithm improves the encryption efficiency has a good security performance, and the encryption algorithm has a higher information entropy 7.42 as well as a lower correlation coefficient 0.653.