Security analysis of an audio data encryption scheme based on key chaining and DNA encoding

Abstract

Fairly recently, a new audio encryption scheme has been proposed. The cryptosystem is based on a substitution-permutation algorithm using DNA encoding. The key-generation of this proposed scheme is based on a key chaining mode, that generates a new key block for every plain block using the chaotic logistic map. After several statistical tests, handled by the authors of the scheme, they claimed that their cryptosystem is robust. In this paper, we scrutinize the cryptosystem from a cryptanalytic perspective, and we handle several security attacks to evaluate the immunity of the system, and to assess its possible adoption in real-world applications. We demonstrate two successful conventional attacks on the scheme, which are: the chosen ciphertext and chosen-plaintext attacks. The cryptosystem’s shuffling process design is scrutinized as well, and a cycle attack is described using the drawn results. Lessons learned from this cryptanalytic paper, are then outlined in order to be considered in further designs and proposals.