Summary
In telemedicine and e‐health system, the medical images are transmitted through telecommunication. In telecommunication, medical images are transmitted through open source networks. The hackers can tamper or add noise to medical images. Diagnosing the correct disease from the altered medical images is highly impossible. Hence indulge with security, confidentiality and integrity for medical images. In this work, heterogeneous hyper chaotic maps, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) cryptography and SHA‐512 is proposed in a new multilevel cryptosystem. The multilevel permutation is performed using heterogeneous chaotic map and zigzag transform. The multilevel diffusion is performed using DNA multiplication and DNA ADD operation. To verify the integrity the SHA‐512 is employed. All DNA coding, and DNA decoding rules are employed dynamically to generate the encrypted medical image. The introduced multilevel cryptosystem provide better security analysis for medical image transmission. The proposed method is implemented in MATLAB software. The performance of proposed approach is associated with existing approaches in terms of evaluating parameters like NPCR (number of pixel changing rate), UACI (unified average changed intensity), correlation coefficient and time taken in seconds. Hence it proves the performance and efficiency of the proposed method are high as compared to the existing methods. The proposed approach also improves the security level and offers integrity and confidentiality, and provide better medical image for encryption with less time complexity.