A DNA and Amino Acids-Based Implementation of Playfair Cipher

Abstract

The DNA cryptography is a new and very promising direction in cryptography research. Although in its primitive stage, DNA cryptography is shown to be very effective. Currently, several DNA computing algorithms are proposed for quite some cryptography, cryptanalysis and steganography problems, and they are very powerful in these areas. This paper discusses a significant modification to the old Playfair cipher by introducing DNA-based and amino acids-based structure to the core of the ciphering process. In this study, a binary form of data, such as plaintext messages, or images are transformed into sequences of DNA nucleotides. Subsequently, these nucleotides pass through a Playfair encryption process based on amino-acids structure. The fundamental idea behind this encryption technique is to enforce other conventional cryptographic algorithms which proved to be broken, and also to open the door for applying the DNA and Amino Acids concepts to more conventional cryptographic algorithms to enhance their security features.