Enhancing Medical Image Security Leveraging Quantum Key Distribution

The rapid development of healthcare system has increased the necessities for the secure medical image transmission. As quantum computers develop, classical cryptographic techniques become vulnerable to quantum attacks. This paper proposes QKD assisted quantum encryption for medical images. BB84 protocol is utilised to generate a secure shared key, which is further enhanced using Henon maps. The logistic map whose parameters are derived from the shared key is employed to generate the permutation sequence for pixel values. Medical images are encoded using the novel enhanced quantum representation (NEQR) and encrypted via quantum permutation and quantum XOR operations employing block‐wise strategy. The proposed method was evaluated in both ideal and noisy quantum environments such as amplitude damping, depolarising, bit‐flip and phase damping noise models. The experimental results show strong security performance on a benchmark and medical images with high entropy values, near zero‐pixel correlation and resistance to differential attacks. Additionally, noise analysis shows that bit‐flip and amplitude damping noises affect the image reconstruction more than phase damping and depolarising noise. Overall, the proposed framework provides a secure solution for medical image security.