Security of Multi-frame DICOM Images Using XOR Encryption Approach

Transferring medical images using networks is subjected to a wide variety of security risks. Hence, there is a need of a robust and secure mechanism to exchange medical images over the Internet. The Digital Image and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) standard provides attributes for the header data confidentiality but not for the pixel image data. In this paper, a simple and effective encryption approach for pixel data is provided for multi-frame DICOM medical images. The main goal of the proposed approach is to reduce the encryption and decryption time of these images, using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) where only one image is encrypted and XOR cipher for encrypting the remaining multi-frame DICOM images. The proposed algorithm is evaluated using computational time, normalized correlation, entropy, Peak-Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (PSNR) and histogram analysis. The results show that the proposed approach can reduce the encryption and decryption time and is able to ensure image confidentiality.