A New Framework for Secure Outsourcing of Medical Data

Nowadays security has become one of the challenging problems in almost all fields like IT, Banking, Medical, MNC companies, and many more. Cryptography and steganography are some of the few techniques used to provide the security for the text, images and many other multimedia data which is to be transferred over the network. Although the researchers are coming up with more and more enhancements in these fields, still there is a demand for new security challenges for the present-day digital data expansion. The limitation of the Cryptography is after encryption the ciphertext looks meaningless and it is vulnerable to the attacker and thus it raises a transmission interruption. On the other hand, the limitation of steganography is once the hidden information is revealed message is disclosed. The digital users regularly transfer a lot of files from one system to other system either within the range or far range by using the internet or intranet and simultaneously they also look for more security. In this work, a merged technique is proposed to improve the security in which first the message is encrypted using primitive cryptography algorithm—BlowFish and the obtained ciphertext is embedded into an image file using Least Significant Bit (LSB) technique. Here the medical image file is also considered as sensitive data and it is encrypted using a double embedding process with another cover image. This client-side encryption framework helps in providing secure outsourcing of medical data to a third party environment like any cloud service.