Secure medical image sharing: A hardware authentication approach

The advancements happening in the domain of information technology resulted in growing stature of rapid communication across the world. Telemedicine is one such arena which is benefitted largely because of such revolution. DICOM images are one of the important medical information carriers shared mostly through an unsecured network across the hospitals and health centers. Protection of such significant medical records against unauthorized access needs an important attention. In this work, the medical image is stored in on-chip memory of FPGA and upon authentication through an unique key received through the keyboard, the image will be displayed in a VGA monitor. In the event of detecting wrong password / key, the encryption of medical image has been carried out using Cellular Automata (CA). Authentication has been improved by hardware triggered password. The proposed multiplexed image authentication was implemented on reconfigurable hardware platform Cyclone II FPGA. Hardware utility and power dissipation have been analysed as a part of this work.