Security of Medical Image Information by Cryptography and Watermarking Using Python

The healthcare sector is a prominent target for cyberattacks due to weak cybersecurity procedures, sensitive data storage, and a desperate need to maintain business continuity at any cost. Using methods such as visual cryptography, steganography, watermarking, and digital signing are most singularly implemented for image security. However, this chapter proposes a hybrid technique of cryptography, watermarking, and a passkey to protect from cyberattacks. This is implemented and demonstrated by developing a graphical USER Interface (GUI) using open-source Python programming for healthcare information security. Further, qualitative and quantitative analysis is carried out by obtaining the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), mean square error (MSE), average difference (AD), maximum difference (MD), normalized absolute error (NAE), and normalized cross-correlation (NCC) performance measures for original and decrypted medical images, which outperform the proposed method over individual used techniques.