A Framework to Secure Medical Image Storage in Cloud Computing Environment

Abstract

Nowadays, modern healthcare providers create massive medical images every day because of the recent progress in imaging tools. This is generally due to the increasing number of patients demanding medical services. This has resulted in a continuous demand of a large storage space. Unfortunately, healthcare domains still use local data centers for storing medical data and managing business processes. This has significant negative impacts on operating costs associated with licensing fees and maintenance. To overcome these challenges, healthcare organizations are interested in adopting cloud storage rather than on-premise hosted solutions. This is mainly justified by the scalability, cost savings and availability of cloud services. The primary objective of this model is to outsource data and delegate IT computations to an external party. The latter delivers needed storage systems via the Internet to fulfill client's demands. Even though this model provides significant cost advantages, using cloud storage raises security challenges. To this aim, this article describes several solutions which were proposed to ensure data protection. The existing implementations suffer from many limitations. The authors propose a framework to secure the storage of medical images over cloud computing. In this regard, they use multi-region segmentation and watermarking techniques to maintain both confidentiality and integrity. In addition, they rely on an ABAC model to ensure access control to cloud storage. This solution mainly includes four functions, i.e., (1) split data for privacy protection, (2) authentication for medical dataset accessing, (3) integrity checking, and (4) access control to enforce security measures. Hence, the proposal is an appropriate solution to meet privacy requirements.