DESIGN OF A SECURED HOSPITAL DATA TRANSMISSION SYSTEM USING STEGANOGRAPHY AND CRYPTOGRAPHY FOR IMPLEMENTATION

Steganography and cryptography are two popular ways of sending vital information in a secret way. One hides the existence of the message and the other distorts the message itself. In this work we developed a system where we created a new technique in which cryptography and steganography are used as integrated part along with newly developed enhanced security module for the health sector. To achieve this, a robust steganographic algorithm to embed sensitive information and cryptography to encrypt the data where designed and we develop the system structure for encryption and steganography using unified modelling language (UML) diagram. The parallel adoption method was implemented to test the application which was designed using PHP and MYSQL version 5.5.24. The application runs on the browser of the client and communicates with the server at the other end. We have been able to introduce cryptography using the DES (Data Encryption Standard) and steganography in the Health sector for securing sensitive health records from unauthorized users gaining or even having access to view sensitive records. Data security is guaranteed in that, even if the data been transferred becomes intercepted, the interceptor will not have the needed cryptographic key for decipherment.