RSA based encryption decryption of medical images

The use of computer networks to transmit medical information is faced to data security problems. Hence it is necessary to make these data unreadable and indecipherable during their transfer. The encryption and decryption of medical images are performed either by software or hardware. A software implementation has the advantage of being portable and low cost but its drawback is the slowness decryption of a huge volume of data, compared to the hardware implementation and its inability to protect private keys. This is the reason that incited us to software implement the RSA protocol to encrypt and decrypt medical images by combining MATLAB and Maple tools. This software implementation has served as a basis comparison to the hardware implementation of the same protocol on an FPGA circuit. Some strategies have been adopted to make this software implementation the fastest in order to permit to the user generating keys, encrypting and decrypting medical images of different sizes with different keys sizes in a reasonable time based on the influence of the RSA parameters on the delays of the encryption/decryption operations.