Hiding Information in the DNA Sequence Using DNA Steganographic Algorithms with Double-Layered Security

Introduction

Nowadays, people use the internet more frequently, and they can easily obtain information in a variety of fields. Electronic media helps to share information via internet; attackers can make many duplicates and infringe the intellectual property rights of certified users (Dhawan & Gupta, 2021; Kour & Verma, 2014). This brings less security and privacy to the data. Steganography and Cryptography are the two different approaches that help to protect information from unauthorized people (Rahmani, & Mudgal, 2015).

Cryptography is one of the standard approaches used to protect confidential information between parties (Hazra, Ghosh, & Jash, 2018). This approach uses the key to convert the plain message into a cipher message and transmitted on an unsecured network among parties. While, steganography completely covers up the data behind the cover objects. In steganography, only the sender and recipient are aware of the message, whereas in cryptography the existence of scrambled text is evident to the world (Kumar, Sasidharan, Karthikha, Sherly, & Avani, 2010). Watermarking and fingerprinting are two different techniques that are correlated with steganography. In watermarking, information is specially encoded in the picture, sound, video that recognizes the copyright proprietor or an authorized client. In fingerprinting, no information is added and it can be analyzed by extracting the specific feature in the media (Hsieh, Chen, & Shen, 2014; Sharda, & Budhiraja, 2013).

Steganography is the classical approach to protect the important information of a person, management, government, etc. (Vijayakumar, Vijayalakshmi, & Rajashree, 2018). The hidden information in the cover object is unnoticeable by a person. In steganography, the data can be hidden in various formats such as image, video, audio, and even in DNA or RNA (Mishra & Bhanodiya, 2015; Vinodhini, Malathi, & Gireesh Kumar, 2017). Image steganography is one of the most commonly used methods for concealing data in the image. The size of the confidential data can be determined based on the pixels of the input image (Poornima & Iswarya, 2013). Therefore, using image steganography, only minimum secret data can be stored. To resolve the capacity limitation, DNA steganography was developed. This method uses the DNA sequence as a cover and allows sensitive data to be transmitted securely (Al-Harbi, Alahmadi, & Aljahdali, 2020). Deoxyribonucleic acid is the foundation of all the living things. The theoretical form of human DNA chain has four bases: Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, and Guanine are used for concealing the data (Sajisha, & Mathew, 2017; Torkaman, Kazazi, & Rouddini, 2012). About three billion sequences of DNA are in theoretical form and it is complex. Since it has a high storage space it can store a lot of data which requires more time to locate the hidden data within the DNA chain (Marwan, Shawish, & Nagaty, 2016).

This paper gives a brief explanation of three algorithms that are used to hide information in the DNA chain. Payload, BPN, capacity, and cracking probability are also measured. The outcome of the proposed algorithms provides a low cracking probability.

The remaining paper contains a Literature Review in section 2, Hiding and Extraction Techniques in section 3, and Performance Analysis of the Proposed Algorithm in section 4.