DNA-based cryptographic methods for data hiding in DNA media
Introduction
Nowadays, the importance of information gives rise to the requirement of inventing methodologies for a secure huge data transmission with high speed. Cryptography and steganography play an important role in information security, although they are independent techniques yet they can be combined to provide a high secure environment. While cryptography is the process of encrypting data by transforming it from a meaningful form to a nonsense one using a key (Paul et al., 1996, Nirmalya Kar and Majumder, 2013), steganography is the process of hiding data into a medium such that this medium appears to be unsuspicious. The combination between cryptography and steganography is done by first encrypting data using an encryption technique and then hiding it into a transportation medium using a steganography technique (Atito et al., 2012).
The most common transportation media for steganography are images, audio, videos, and DNA. DNA steganography proved to be more promising because of its huge storage capacity, complexity, and randomness. These features provide great uncertainty which makes encoding data into a DNA format to hide it within a DNA medium is far better than any other steganography mechanisms (Adleman, 1994, Smith and Group, 2003, Alberts and Johnson, 2008). Encryption is the main process in cryptography, and even recently cryptography is referred to as encryption. From the numerous encryption techniques, only the DNA-based playfair cipher and the vigenere cipher have been investigated for merging with the DNA steganography (Atito et al., 2012, Zicheng Wang and Zhao, 2013). This limited research did not show the real capabilities of the DNA media, which motivated us besides the continuous need for high secure and efficient data transmission to thoroughly investigate other encryption techniques and present new improved ones.
In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of the most effective encryption techniques whether asymmetric or symmetric, classical or advanced. We used the RSA cipher as the commonly used asymmetric cipher, the vigenere, and the DNA-based playfair cipher as substitution symmetric ciphers and finally the AES as the most current advanced symmetric cipher used. Each of these techniques has been merged with the DNA steganography by using the modified substitution process for data hiding mentioned by Khalifa and Atito (2012). In other words, data is firstly ciphered using any of the famous cryptographic techniques, then the resultant ciphered data is encoded into a DNA format and hid into a real DNA sequence using the modified substitution steganography technique. Within this context, extensive experimental studies have been conducted to measure the impact of each cryptographic technique in terms of security, speed, performance and hiding capacity in addition to the key size and the data size.
Moreover, from our analysis, we discovered that DNA-based playfair cipher is the most promising encryption technique to be combined with DNA steganography. We modified it to maximize its hiding capacity and minimize its time complexity. Our extensive experimental studies showed the outstanding performance of the proposed new technique in terms of speed, performance and hiding capacity in addition to maintaining a high-security level.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows; Section 2 covers the related work and background of this research area. Section 3 addresses all of the cryptography techniques and discusses their pros and cons, then it is finalized by a brief discussion on the results. The process of selecting the most promising cryptography technique and updating it is described in Section 4. The extensive simulation studies and their results are illustrated and discussed in Section 5. Finally, the paper is concluded and the future work is noted in the last section.
Section snippets
Background
In this section, we provide a biological background on DNA, followed by a brief overview of the DNA steganography techniques and the recently used cryptography techniques, ended by the related work in both research areas.
Comparative analysis
In this work, we are focusing on some terms for comparing the usage of the mostly used encryption techniques combined with DNA steganography. These terms are key size, data size, security according to the measure of cryptanalysis of each technique, time complexity, and hiding capacity. These parameters are chosen according to the majority of researches evaluating steganographic techniques (Khalifa and Atito, 2012, Verma, 2011, Nirmalya Kar and Majumder, 2013, Shiu et al., 2010, Singhal and
The proposed technique
Our proposed technique uses 4 × 4 playfair cipher grid as a modified version for the 5 × 5 traditional playfair cipher grid. We use the key's ASCII value as a seed number for generating 16 unique random English letters to be represented by the 4 × 4 playfair cipher grid as the example shown in Table 3. Another 4 × 4 grid is used, called the 4 × 4 binary grid where each cell contains one of the 4-bit possible combinations as shown in Table 4, where the values in this grid are sorted in an ascending order.
Experimental results
Our proposed DNA-based playfair cipher technique was compared with the results of the current DNA-based playfair cipher in Khalifa and Atito (2012), the vigenere cipher, the RSA cipher, and the AES cipher. This experimental comparison confirms that our proposed algorithm is the most promising encryption technique to be combined with DNA steganography with respect to the maximum size of bits that can be embedded in the cover media which named as the hiding capacity and execution time. Our
Conclusion and future work
This paper presented a comprehensive comparative analysis between the vigenere cipher, DNA-based playfair cipher, AES cipher and RSA cipher as encryption techniques, each combined with a steganography technique named as substitution process, in terms of key size, data size, speed, security level and hiding capacity. Results from this analysis showed that the RSA cipher can hardly deal with large data sets since it will require extensive computational efforts. Moreover, it showed that the AES
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