Nancy Anu George MSc Dissertation 2013/14

Hiding Medical Data in Physiological Signals

Supervised by R.Clayton

Abstract

The need for security in computing has become extremely important over the past few years, given the increasing use of technology in almost all aspects of life. One area where the use of technology and computing has grown in leaps and bounds is the medical industry. Electronic Health Records (EHR's) created by hospitals for patients need to be protected from unauthorized access. Hospitals are also moving towards the use of remote health care monitoring systems and point-of-care technologies to reduce medical labour cost. Since the Internet is used to exchange this information with health care workers, security and privacy issues are introduced.

The project aims to explore ways of hiding medical patient data in physiological signals using suitable steganographic techniques, and to then perform different experiments using the original and modified signals.

An application was built that enables users to hide patient data in ECG and EEG signals using the Least Significant Bit (LSB) technique. The application also recovers the hidden data from the signal. Different experiments were performed on the original and modified signals, one of the main objectives being to measure the distortion of the signal due to data hiding. The features of the application were also tested using unit and integration test techniques.