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Today’s business runs on data. Data forms the most valuable asset for majority of the companies. No industry is immune to data security threats. Advancements in technology has given a platform for cybercrimes as well. Cybercrimes pose severe threats to the world-wide economy and the society(Tsakalidis, 2019). According to the statistics gathered by Breach Level Index, more than 2 million records per day were breached in year 2014, which means 32 records were breached each second. Protecting the irreplaceable data is very challenging and has highest priority in the current scenario of cybercrime. It is obvious that new tactics are required to protect the intellectual property, documents or any other sensitive information.
Carrying the data in the form of DNA!!! Yes, sounds fascinating. DNA cryptography is a key innovation in the field of cryptography. A new technique for securing the data was introduced using biological structure of DNA, called as DNA computing. It was invented by Leonard Adleman in the year 1994 for solving complex problems like directed Hamilton path problem, NP complete problems (Adleman, 1994). Later, the technique was extended by various researchers for encrypting and reducing the size of the data to aid faster and secure transmission over a network(Cherian et al., 2013; Roy & Nath, 2016). The strong features of DNA like vast parallelism, exceptional energy efficiency and extraordinary information storage capacity, uniqueness are being explored for computing, data storage and cryptography. The concept of DNA computing in the field of DNA cryptography has paved the way for the development of unbreakable algorithms (Hammad et al., 2020; S & Murugavalli, 1999).
DNA is the carrier of information which contains the fundamental and distinctive characteristics or qualities of a living being. DNA is made up of molecules called nucleotides. Each nucleotide contains a phosphate group, a sugar group and a nitrogen base. The four types of nitrogen bases are adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G) and cytosine (C). The order of these bases is what determines DNA's instructions, or genetic code. Nucleotides are attached together to form two long strands that spiral to create a structure called a double helix. In a double helix DNA string, the two strands are complementary to each other, A to T and C to G according to Watson crick rules (M.K, 2016).
DNA encryption uses several concepts listed below.
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Bio molecular structure, the randomness and incredible information storage nature of DNA is the greatest strength for developing a strong encryption algorithm.
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Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) used for amplifying the DNA segments.
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Central dogma of molecular biology is the process by which the information contained in genes is converted into corresponding protein.
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One Time Pad (OTP) technique, a plaintext is paired with a random secret key which is called as one time pad using some modular arithmetic operation (M.K, 2016).