Developing multitier lightweight techniques for protecting medical images within ubiquitous environments

When one begins to think about security and P2P networks, and in particular, ad-hoc P2P ubiquitous networks with no real centralization, one must take a leap from the accepted, in place, on-the-Internet, security practices into the unknown. The article describes an ongoing project at Lakehead University to establish a secure P2P ubiquitous environment using the JXTA infrastructure. Two important issues are particularly addressed: (1) transforming an image into XML so it can be sent as a JXTA message; (2) securely transmitting or storing images using a lightweight dynamically reconfigured stream cipher. The proposed stream cipher is compared to other notable stream ciphers used for ubiquitous environments.