DNA computing in cryptography

Abstract

Cryptography is used to prevent any unintentional party from reading or manipulating any confidential information by converting it from the sender to the receiver and vice versa. It brings ideal security to the e-commerce industry and the Internet. Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) computing is a bioscience-inspired technology that uses DNA as an information carrier for secure communications over networks. Adleman proposed the idea of DNA computing in 1994. The molecular structure of DNA and its complex processes such as hybridization or polymerase chain reaction (PCR) provide tremendous parallelism, energy efficiency, and superior storage capacity; it is one of the most advanced forms of information representation. Therefore, there is a trend in cryptography to develop many new algorithms to secure data. In DNA computational cryptography, information is encrypted in a DNA sequence using molecular computation, whereas existing conventional cryptography uses complex mathematical procedures for encryption. This chapter discusses the DNA computational techniques proposed by different researchers for different encryption goals such as encryption and decryption, authentication, digital signatures, and the challenges of implementing DNA computation in cryptography.