DNA-Based Data Encryption and Hiding Using Playfair and Insertion Techniques

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to communicate data securely. The proposed technique is a composition of both encryption and data hiding using some properties of Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) sequences. Hence, the proposed scheme consists mainly of two phases. In the first phase, the secret data is encrypted using a DNA and Amino Acids-Based Playfair cipher. While in the second phase the encrypted data is steganographically hidden into some reference DNA sequence using an insertion technique.The proposed algorithm can successfully work on any binary data since it is actually transformed into a sequence of DNA nucleotides using some binary conversion rule. Subsequently, these nucleotides are represented as an amino acids structure in order to pass through the specially designed Playfair Cipher and encrypt it into another DNA sequence. Then, this encrypted DNA data is randomly inserted into some reference DNA sequence to produce a faked DNA sequence with the encrypted data hidden. In order to recover the embedded secret data, the receiver can carry out the inverse process with the help of the both the secret key and the reference DNA sequence.