Image encryption through RNA approach assisted with neural key sequences

Abstract

In this paper, an image encryption algorithm is proposed for the first time, which uses coding deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequences to transcript its complementary messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) sequence. A binary associative memory neural network (BAM NN) is trained to produce the required transfer ribonucleic acid (tRNA) sequences to bond with the mRNA sequences to assign the correct amino acids. DNA and mRNA sequences, together with tRNA sequences, provide the permutation and diffusion operations for the pixels in colour digital imaging and communications in medicine images. Then, keys, which are determined by the generated amino acids, are used to encrypt the diffused cipher pixels further. Also key sharing has been carried out using Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP), cloud infrastructure and One Time Password (OTP) generation mechanisms.The different sequence formation can also identify any alterations made by the intruder in the amino acid, which results in the wrong set of key generation. Various decryption quality analyses, statistical and differential attack analyses (namely mean square error, unified average changing intensity, peak signal-to-noise ratio, number of pixel changing rate, entropy, mean absolute error, key sensitivity, cropping attacks, and chosen-plaintext attacks), and correlation tests were carried out to confirm the robustness of the proposed algorithm.