Securing digital economies byimplementing DNA cryptography with amino acid and one-time pad

Abstract

Technology is transforming rapidly. Security during data transmission is an increasingly critical and essential factor for the integrity and confidentiality of data in the financial domain, such as e-commerce transactions and bank transactions, etc. We cannot overestimate the importance of encryption/decryption of information in the digital economy. The need to strengthen and secure the digital economy is urgent. Cryptography maintains the security and integrity of data kept on computers and data communicated over the internet using encryption/decryption. A new concept in cryptography named DNA cryptography has attracted the interest of information security professionals. The DNA cryptography method hides data using a DNA sequence, with DNA encryption converting binary data into the DNA sequence. Deoxy Ribonucleic Acid (DNA) is a long polymer strand having nitrogen bases adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C), and guanine (G), which play an important role in plain text encoding and decoding. DNA has high storage capacity, fast processing, and high computation capacity, and is more secure than other cryptography algorithms. DNA cryptography supports both symmetric and asymmetric cryptography. DNA cryptography can encrypt numeric values, English language and unicast. The main aim of this paper is to explain different aspects of DNA cryptography and how it works. We also compare different DNA algorithms/methods proposed in a previous paper, and implement DNA cryptography using one-time pad (OTP) and amino acid sequence using java language. OTP is used for symmetric key generation and the DNA sequence is converted to an amino acid sequence to create confusion.