Quantum encryption of healthcare images: Enhancing security and confidentiality in e‐health systems

Abstract Ensuring the security and privacy of patient data in e‐healthcare systems that rely on cloud computation is of utmost importance. Traditional encryption is no longer resistant to quantum attacks and safeguards sensitive medical images. To tackle this issue, robust security countermeasures are proposed by integrating quantum encryption with a cloud‐based healthcare system. The encryption scheme utilizes the Generalized Novel Enhancement Quantum Representation (GNEQR) and the Novel Enhancement Quantum Representation (NEQR) to provide a framework for representing color and grayscale healthcare images. The proposed quantum algorithm uses quantum logic for image scrambling, which is combined with the encryption key by the Xor quantum gate. The encryption key is generated by 9D chaotic and permutated before encryption. Finally, channel re‐ordering is applied for color images. The simulation results for 15 medical tests with an encryption key space >2 600 on a developed e‐healthcare system demonstrate the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed work where the average number of pixels change rates was 99.82, while the unified average change intensity rate was 33.51, entropy was 7.9, the horizontal, vertical, and diagonal correlation coefficients averaged 0.000533333, 0.000706667, and 0.00076, respectively. Finally, the mean squared error (MSE) between the original and encrypted images was 10203.72. These findings improve digital healthcare by revealing the solutions' performance, security, and efficacy.