Securing MRI Images by Stego-Crypto Lightweight Encryption

As medical imaging technology has advanced, the effective privacy, integrity and security of MRI images has emerged as a daunting challenge, largely due to the ongoing rise of cyber threats against healthcare systems. As medical data traverse's networks and is stored on different systems, it is susceptible to unauthorized access, data tampering and breaches. This work suggests an all-encompassing, multi-layer security framework using steganography and three levels of cryptographic encryption AES-128, ASCON, and ECC to safeguard sensitive medical data such as MRIs from these threats. The proposed system will first use Least Significant Bit (LSB) steganography to embed the MRI image into a cover image so that the medical content is hidden in plain view. The cover image or stego image is then encrypted with three levels of encryption; AES-128 takes advantage of fast symmetric encryption that is one of the most secure encryption methods, ASCON offers lightweight authenticated encryption albeit a secure authenticated encryption, ECC provides the secure encryption keys in an asymmetric method. In order to have the data hidden and properly encrypted, the user (physician/patient) must authenticate themselves with the hospital credentials before the stego image is decrypted and patient MRI image displayed. Also, a final verification step on the user side will take place to identify additional objects to strengthen identity confirmation. After you authenticate, the data is backtracked through all three levels of decryption, and you should have the original MRI image with no loss of quality. This is a general strategy to enhance patient privacy over medical records and creates real security control for healthcare data management systems. We significantly reduce check point data leak potential any time (even while at rest). We meet data privacy standards and could provide a strong and scalable methodology to secure the sending and storing of medical images.