DNA Structured- based Encryption Algorithms

Abstract

The 21 century is a period of information explosion in which information has become a very important strategic resource, and so the task of information security has become increasingly important. Cryptography is the most important component part of the infrastructure of communication security and computer security. However, there are many latent defects in some of the classical cryptography technology of modern cryptography which have been broken by some attack programs. This means that modern cryptography encryption technology based on mathematical problems is no longer invulnerable. DNA cryptography is a new promising field in cryptography which emerged with the progress of DNA computing. The Concept of massive parallelism and extraordinary information density inherent in DNA molecules are explored for cryptographic purposes such as encryption, authentication, signature, and so on. Moreover, DNA as a medium is not only random but also significant and meaningful. DNA-based data hiding techniques actually depend on the high randomness of the DNA to hide any message without being noticed. In fact, the tremendous storage capacity of DNA as well as the ability to synthesize DNA sequences in any desirable length makes DNA a perfect medium for data hiding. In this work, Algorithms were developed in the fields of cryptography, steganography and data encoding. In the first part of our work, we introduced and implemented six data encoding techniques to convert data from digital (binary) form to DNA form then to amino acid’s form and vice versa. One of them is based on the distribution of RNA codons on the 20 natural amino acids while the rest are based on a proposed artificial distribution that includes 26 virtual amino acids instead of 20. We investigated the possibility of implementing multiple rounds of encoding and showed that the concept of multiple rounds is applicable to all of them. Afterwards, comparison between the six algorithms is carried out to specify the shared properties and main differences between them. These different encoding algorithms aim to increase the flexibility of converting data between biological medium and other digital medium. Afterwards, we used these encoding techniques in cryptographic and steganographic applications.