Medical Images Encryption Based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography and Chaos Theory

Telecare Medical Information Systems (TMIS) is one of the most important remote technics used for diagnostic and treatment of patients. In this context, the importance of a safe exchange of medical data, comprising signals, images, etc. has received a special attention these recent years. Indeed, as the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) objects contain images and linked medical information about the patient, their security and privacy must be addressed seriously. In this framework, many encryption techniques are proposed in the literature to resolve this issue using numerous cryptographic solutions such chaos based theory, elliptic curves cryptography (ECC) and other lightweight solutions. In this paper, we present a comparative study between two encryption approaches namely the ECC and chaos. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time a comparison between a chaos-based symmetric encryption and EEC based asymmetric encryption is introduced for medical image protection. The performance of the two considered crypto-systems is evaluated in terms of security analysis and execution time. The obtained results are promising and can be used to look further into the exploration of this axis of research.