The task of preserving patient data is becoming more sophisticated with the evolution of technology and its integration with the medical sector in the form of telemedicine and electronic health (e-health). Secured medical image transmission requires adequate techniques for protecting patient privacy. This study aims at encrypting Coronavirus (COVID-19) images of Computed Tomography (CT) chest scan into cipherimages for secure real-world data transmission of infected patients. Provably safe pseudo-random generators are used for the production of a "key-stream" to achieve high privacy of patient data. The Blum Blum Shub (BBS) generator is a powerful generator of pseudo-random bit-strings. In this article, a hashing version of BBS, namely Hash-BBS (HBBS) generator, is presented to exploit the benefits of a hash function to reinforce the integrity of extracted binary sequences for creating multiple key-streams. The NIST-test-suite has been used to analyze and verify the statistical properties of resulted key bit-strings of all tested operations. The obtained bit-strings showed good randomness properties; consequently, uniform distributed binary sequence was achieved over the key length. Based on the obtained key-streams, an encryption scheme of four COVID-19 CT-images is proposed and designed to attain a high grade of confidentiality and integrity in transmission of medical data. In addition, a comprehensive performance analysis was done using different evaluation metrics. The evaluation results of this study demonstrated that the proposed key-stream generator outperforms the other security methods of previous studies. Therefore, it can be successfully applied to satisfy security requirements of transmitting CT-images for COVID-19 patients.
Keywords: Blum blum shub; Coronavirus COVID-19 and security analysis; Hash function; Image encryption; Key-stream generator.
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