Secure Electronic Medical Records Transmission using NTRU Cryptosystem and LSB in Audio Steganography

Abstract

Electronic medical records (EMR) are vital information, extremely sensitive private data in healthcare, and need to be frequently shared via the internet among peers. One of the major benefits derived from the internet is the ease of sending information from one system to another, irrespective of the location or distance between the nodes. This, and many other related important functionality, over the years, has attracted attackers who dedicate themselves to breaching the integrity, availability and confidentiality of EMR information. Existing literature have proposed cryptographic techniques that are not quantum-safe. In this paper, an audiobased system for hiding EMR information using a quantumsafe cryptographic technique, Nth degree Truncated Polynomial Ring Units (NTRU) cryptosystem, and the Least Significant Bit (LSB) steganographic technique is proposed. The system was evaluated based on embedding capacity (EC), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), mean square error (MSE), and histogram plots. Results showed our proposed system is able to securely hide the medical records without causing significant distortions in the original audio.