Bio-inspired cryptosystem on the reciprocal domain: DNA strands mutate to secure health data

Healthcare and telemedicine industries are relying on technology that is connected to the Internet. Digital health data are more prone to cyber attacks because of the treasure trove of personal data they possess. This necessitates protection of digital medical images and their secure transmission. In this paper, an encryption technique based on DNA mutated with Lorenz and Lu chaotic attractors is employed to generate high pseudo-random key streams. The proposed chaos-DNA cryptic system operates on the integer wavelet transform (IWT) domain and a bio-inspired crossover, mutation unit for enhancing the confusion and diffusion phase in an approximation coefficient. Finally, an XOR operation is performed with a quantised chaotic set from the developed combined attractors. The algorithm attains an average entropy of 7.9973, near-zero correlation with an NPCR of 99.642%, a UACI of 33.438%, and a keyspace of 10(203). Further, the experimental analyses and NIST statistical test suite have been designed such that the proposed medical image encryption technique has the potency to withstand any statistical, differential, and brute force attacks.