A Multiple-Medical-Image Encryption Method Based on SHA-256 and DNA Encoding

Ensuring the privacy and secrecy of digital medical images has become a pressing issue as a result of the quick development of smart medical technology and the exponential growth in the quantity of medical images transmitted and stored in networks. The lightweight multiple-image encryption approach for medical images that is suggested in this research can encrypt/decrypt any number of medical photos of varied sizes with just one encryption operation and has a computational cost that is similar to encrypting a single image. The plaintext images with different sizes are filled at the right and bottom of the image to ensure that the size of all plaintext images is uniform; then, all the filled images are stacked to obtain a superimposed image. The initial key, which is generated using the SHA-256 technique, is then used as the starting value of the linear congruence algorithm to create the encryption key sequence. The cipher picture is then created by encrypting the superimposed image with the encryption key and DNA encoding. The algorithm can be made even more secure by implementing a decryption mechanism that decrypts the image independently in order to reduce the possibility of information leaking during the decryption process. The outcomes of the simulation experiment demonstrate the algorithm’s strong security and resistance to interference such as noise pollution and lost image content.