A Novel Technique to Secure Telemedicine Using Blockchain and Visual Cryptography

Medical facilities in the different regions of the world are not available as per requirement. More significantly, remote and rural areas have lots of scarcity of quality doctors and diagnosis facilities. Today, the whole world is connected via the Internet which can be used to facilitate medical prescription and diagnosis at distant places. Everything about these facilities is defined by a hypernym that is telemedicine. Medical data of the patients is very confidential and can be misused if someone is able to access the network and retrieve the data. Security mechanisms, such as digital watermarking and other primitive cryptographic technologies, are in use, but these technologies have their limitations. Therefore, there is a need to propose a security mechanism that can provide confidentiality, integrity, and authentication. The research proposes a security mechanism based on blockchain. The security features provided by blockchain, along with cryptographic primitives, can be used to safeguard the information. Most of the medical data is in an image format. The pixels of the data are arranged along with the patient's personal information, and a corresponding hash value is generated. Every terminal in the blockchain network is updated with the basic agreement and a hash value. It is protected with a proof-of-work mechanism which is very complex even to brute force. Along with this, elliptic curve digital signature algorithm and partial homomorphic encryption algorithm are also implemented to further ensure confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of the data. The paper also presents a use case where we have used visual cryptography as a means to secure the medical images.