Securing Patient Data in Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS): A Proposed Framework

Abstract

With the increasing reliance on digital systems in the healthcare industry, protecting patients' sensitive data has become a critical concern. This paper focuses on addressing the vulnerabilities in Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) that expose patients' data and images on the internet. The research methodology is divided into two phases, consisting of four major tasks: exploring techniques to access DICOM files, proposing a system architecture, implementing and testing the system, and analyzing the system's output. The first phase investigates attack modeling on PACS images, revealing the security risks associated with DICOM files. The proposed system architecture emphasizes secure transmission and storage of DICOM files, ensuring authorized access. Encryption using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Linear Feedback Shift Register (LFSR) is employed to protect the DICOM files. Key management is achieved using the RSA asymmetric cryptographic scheme. The encrypted DICOM files and keys are securely stored and transferred using Base64 encoding. The system's performance is evaluated based on key generation time, encryption and decryption times, file transfer rates, response rates, algorithm complexity analysis, avalanche effect, and approximate entropy tests. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system in safeguarding patients' data and images in PACS, providing a secure framework for medical image management.