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Symmetric-key cryptosystem with DNA technology

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Abstract

DNA cryptography is a new field which has emerged with progress in the research of DNA computing. In our study, a symmetric-key cryptosystem was designed by applying a modern DNA biotechnology, microarray, into cryptographic technologies. This is referred to as DNA symmetric-key cryptosystem (DNASC). In DNASC, both encryption and decryption keys are formed by DNA probes, while its ciphertext is embedded in a specially designed DNA chip (microarray). The security of this system is mainly rooted in difficult biology processes and problems, rather than conventional computing technology, thus it is unaffected by changes from the attack of the coming quantum computer. The encryption process is a fabrication of a specially designed DNA chip and the decryption process is the DNA hybridization. In DNASC, billions of DNA probes are hybridized and identified at the same time, thus the decryption process is conducted in a massive, parallel way. The great potential in vast parallelism computation and the extraordinary information density of DNA are displayed in DNASC to some degree.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Management, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210093, China

    Lu MingXin

  2. State Key Lab of Information Security, Institute of Software of Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, 100049, China

    Lu MingXin & Xiao GuoZhen

  3. Department of Computer Science & Engineer, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200030, China

    Lai XueJia

  4. State Key Lab of ISN, Xidian University, Xi’an, 710071, China

    Xiao GuoZhen

  5. Cancer Research Institute, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, K7L3N6, Canada

    Qin Lei

Authors
  1. Lu MingXin
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  2. Lai XueJia
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  3. Xiao GuoZhen
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  4. Qin Lei
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Qin Lei.

Additional information

These authors contributed equally to this work.

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Lu, M., Lai, X., Xiao, G. et al. Symmetric-key cryptosystem with DNA technology. SCI CHINA SER F 50, 324–333 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-007-0025-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-007-0025-6

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