An Enhanced DNA-based Steganography Technique with a Higher Hiding Capacity

Abstract

DNA-based Steganography is one of the promising techniques to secure data exchange, where data is hidden into a real DNA sequence. For the sake of security, some steganography techniques encrypt data before hiding it which strengthen the technique's steganalysis. One of the widely used encryption techniques is the DNAbased playfair cipher. This technique intensively requires a long list of preprocessing steps in addition to extra bits which must be added to guarantee successful decryption. Nevertheless, the succeeding hiding step suffers from a limited capacity, which turns this current DNA-based Steganography technique into a complex, inefficient, and time consuming process. In this paper, we propose a new DNA-based Steganography algorithm to simplify the current technique as well as achieve higher hiding capacity. In the proposed algorithm, we enhance the commonly used playfair cipher by defining a novel short sequence of preprocessing steps and getting rid of the extra overhead bits. We also utilize a more efficient technique to enhance the hiding phase. The proposed approach is not only simple and fast but also provides a significantly higher hiding capacity with a high security. The conducted extensive experimental studies confirm the outstanding performance of the proposed algorithm.

Security analysis of DNA based steganography techniques

“…Table 7 shows the performance of the data hiding using double DNA sequences, and the highly improved DNA-based steganography techniques for hiding a 20000-byte secret message in the DNA sequence regarding the capacity, payload, and bits per nucleotide (bpn). The enhanced DNA-based steganography technique hides 2 bits per nucleotide; for example, a reference DNA sequence of 149,884 bp can hide a message up to 36.56 Kb [20], whereas the highly improved method can hide on average 1.46 which is higher than the 0.574 bpn that the data hiding using double DNA sequences method can hide on average.…”

“…The techniques were tested in [18][19][20] As mentioned before, the capacity refers to the total length of the extended reference sequence after the secret message is hidden within it, which can be calculated by |S| + |M| 2 [18]. The payload is the remaining length of the new sequence after extracting out the reference DNA sequence, and can be calculated by |M| 2 [18].…”

“…Marwan, Shawish, and Nagaty [20] introduced this approach to simplify the current techniques and obtain a higher hiding capacity. This technique follows two phases.…”

“…7. Convert the binary sequence (B) into the original message [20]. An illustrative example is given in Fig.…”

Utilizing DNA Strands for Secured Data-Hiding with High Capacity

“…In 2015, Rashmi introduced a novel technique named as the DNA-Based audio steganography technique where a combination between the DNA steganography and audio steganography is obtained [14]. In the same year, S.Marwan proposed a steganography technique using a modified version to the playfair cipher as an encryption method before hiding where this modification leads to higher hiding capacity and better performance as well [15]. In 2016, G.Hamed et~al presented a survey on various DNA-based steganography techniques.…”