Medical Image Encryption by Content-Aware DNA Computing for Secure Healthcare

There exists a rising concern on security of healthcare data and service. Even small lost, stolen, displaced, hacked, or communicated in personal health data could bring huge damage to patients. Therefore, we propose a novel content-aware deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) computing system to encrypt medical images, thus guaranteeing privacy and promoting secure healthcare environment. The proposed system consists of sender and receiver to perform tasks of encryption and decryption, respectively, where both contain the same structure design, but perform opposite operations. In either sender or receiver, we design a randomly DNA encoding and a content-aware permutation and diffusion module. Considering introducing random mechanism to increase difficulty of cracking, the former module builds a random encryption rule selector in DNA encoding process by randomly mapping quantity of medical image pixels to outputs. Meanwhile, the latter module constructs a permutation sequence, which not only encodes information of pixel values, but also involves redundant correlation between adjacent pixels located in a patch. Such design brings awareness property of medical image content to greatly increase complexity in cracking by embedding semantical information for encryption. We demonstrate that the proposed system successfully improve cybersecurity of medical images against various attacks in robustness and effectiveness when transmitting data in wireless broadcasting scenarios.