Secure Medical Image Transmission Using Chaotic Encryption and Blockchain-Based Integrity Verification

Ensuring the integrity and confidentiality of patient medical information is a critical priority in the healthcare sector. In the context of security, this paper proposes a novel encryption algorithm that integrates Blockchain technology, aiming to improve the security and privacy of transmitted data. The proposed encryption algorithm is a block-cipher image encryption scheme based on different chaotic maps: The logistic Map, the Tent Map, and the Henon Map used to generate three encryption keys. The proposed block-cipher system employs the Hilbert curve to perform permutation while a generated chaos-based S-Box is used to perform substitution. Furthermore, the integration of a Blockchain-based solution for securing data transmission and communication between nodes and authenticating the encrypted medical image’s authenticity adds a layer of security to our proposed method. Our proposed cryptosystem is divided into two principal modules presented as a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) used for key generation and an encryption and decryption system based on the properties of confusion and diffusion. The security analysis and experimental tests for the proposed algorithm show that the average value of the information entropy of the encrypted images is 7.9993, the Number of Pixels Change Rate (NPCR) values are over 99.5% and the Unified Average Changing Intensity (UACI) values are greater than 33%. These results prove the strength of our proposed approach, demonstrating that it can significantly enhance the security of encrypted images.