A Double Chaotic Layer Encryption Algorithm for Clinical Signals in Telemedicine

Recently, telemedicine offers medical services remotely via telecommunications systems and physiological monitoring devices. This scheme provides healthcare delivery services between physicians and patients conveniently, since some patients can not attend the hospital due to any reason. However, transmission of information over an insecure channel such as internet or private data storing generates a security problem. Therefore, authentication, confidentiality, and privacy are important challenges in telemedicine, where only authorized users should have access to medical or clinical records. On the other hand, chaotic systems have been implemented efficiently in cryptographic systems to provide confidential and privacy. In this work, we propose a novel symmetric encryption algorithm based on logistic map with double chaotic layer encryption (DCLE) in diffusion process and just one round of confusion-diffusion for the confidentiality and privacy of clinical information such as electrocardiograms (ECG), electroencephalograms (EEG), and blood pressure (BP) for applications in telemedicine. The clinical signals are acquired from PhysioBank data base for encryption proposes and analysis. In contrast with recent schemes in literature, we present a secure cryptographic algorithm based on chaos validated with the most complete security analysis until this time. In addition, the cryptograms are validated with the most complete pseudorandomness tests based on National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 800-22 suite. All results are at MATLAB simulations and all them show the effectiveness, security, robustness, and the potential use of the proposed scheme in telemedicine.