Securing patient data with DNA-Driven symmetric encryption: a novel approach to confidential QR code transmission in healthcare

Preserving patient privacy is an obligation for any healthcare provider. It is an act of mutual trust between the patient and his medical staff. QR code is useful for ensuring a fast and flexible data transfer between different mobile devices, however the easy extraction of the data included in these codes by simple scanning presents a serious privacy threat particularly when dealing with sensitive information such as mandatory reporting diseases. In this paper, authors propose a secure QR code to encode a patient's data and make it non-unintelligible for unauthorized persons. It consists of a DNA-based symmetric encryption using DNA sequences and Huffman coding in its encryption/decryption phases. The proposed approach involves generating a unique and secure QR code for each patient's information. Due to its small size, it offers a simple solution for transferring patient data, reducing internet capacity requirements and minimizing latency.