Symmetric-key cryptosystem with DNA technology

• Published in: Science China. Information sciences Vol. 50; no. 3; pp. 324 - 333
• Main Authors: Lu, MingXin, Lai, XueJia, Xiao, GuoZhen, Qin, Lei
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Heidelberg Springer Nature B.V 01.06.2007; Department of Information Management, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China; State Key Lab of Information Security, Institute of Software of Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing 100049, China%Cancer Research Institute, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, K7L3N6, Canada; State Key Lab of Information Security, Institute of Software of Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing 100049, China%Department of Computer Science & Engineer, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200030, China%State Key Lab of ISN, Xidian University, Xi'an 710071, China
• Subjects: Algorithms; Computation; Cryptography; DNA chips; DNA密码术; DNA计算; Encryption; Quantum computers; 密码系统; 对称密钥; symmetric-key encryption; DNA cryptography; DNA computing
• ISSN: 1009-2757; 1674-733X; 1862-2836; 1869-1919
• DOI: 10.1007/s11432-007-0025-6

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.