An encryption protocol for medical images

Abstract

The security of medical data is a major challenge in our days. Specially protected information are the digital medical images and, consequentely, it is of the first importance to provide efficient algorithms to process and manage in a secure way the digital medical images. The main goal of this paper is to introduce a novel encryption protocol for digital medical images. In this method the digital image is rendered into a three-dimensional solid object and the encryption algorithm is based on the use of three-dimensional cellular automata. The protocol is shown to be secure against the most important cryptanalytic attacks. As the algorithm is based on simple models of computation, its main advantage is that it can be easily and efficiently implemented both in hardware and software.