Page 180 - The-5th-MCAIT2021-eProceeding

Text Encryption Based on DNA Cryptography, RNA, and
Amino Acid

Omar Fitian Rashid

Department of Computer Technology Engineering, Al-Hikma University College, Baghdad, 10015, Iraq
* Email: omaralrawi08@yahoo.com

Abstract
To achieve safe security to transfer data from the sender to receiver, cryptography is one way that is used for such purposes.
However, to increase the level of data security, DNA as a new term was introduced to cryptography. The DNA can be easily
used to store and transfer the data, and it becomes an effective procedure for such aims and used to implement the
computation. A new cryptography system is proposed, consisting of two phases: the encryption phase and the decryption
phase. The encryption phase includes six steps, starting by converting plaintext to their equivalent ASCII values and
converting them to binary values. After that, the binary values are converted to DNA characters and then converted to their
equivalent complementary DNA sequences. These DNA sequences are converted to RNA sequences. Finally, the RNA
sequences are converted to the amino acid, where this sequence is considered as ciphertext to be sent to the receiver. The
decryption phase also includes six steps, which are the same encryption steps but in reverse order. It starts with converting
amino acid to RNA sequences, then converting RNA sequences to DNA sequences and converting them to their equivalent
complementary DNA. After that, DNA sequences are converted to binary values and to their equivalent ASCII values. The
final step is converting ASCII values to alphabet characters that are considered plaintext. For evaluation purposes, six text
files with different sizes have been used as a test material. Performance evaluation is calculated based on encryption time
and decryption time. The achieved results are considered as good and fast, where the encryption and decryption times needed
for a file with size of 1k are equal to 2.578 ms and 2.625 ms respectively, while the encryption and decryption times for a
file with size of 20k are equal to 268.422 ms and 245.469 ms respectively.

Keywords: Cryptography; DNA cryptography; Encryption; Decryption; Security.

1. Introduction
With the modern applications and the increased use of the internet and network technology, the security
threats are also increasing for the users, as accompanied by the large quantity of information transferred on the
network. Various approaches have been used to break the system to steal important information. Therefore,
security becomes a significant subject for those dealing with critical data and for modern computing systems.
Recently, secret writing methods were used to save data from adversaries, and the most popular and most used
method is cryptography (Kaundal and Verma, 2014). The computing technique of DNA cryptography can be
used in encrypting or encoding the data to achieve safe transferring of the information. These capabilities are
due to the DNA properties like parallel molecular computing, storing, transmitting the data, and computing
capabilities (Bhimani, 2018). Cryptography was used to encrypt the data, and several kinds of research were
proposed in this area. An asymmetric cryptography method based on a chaotic map and a multilayer machine
learning network was also introduced (Lin at al., 2021). This system improved the security for real-time
applications by randomly generating numbers to update secret keys using particular control parameters. A new
mapping method was proposed by Keerthi and Surendiran (2017) to encode the message as points for the elliptic
curve. The proposed technique begins by converting text to ASCII values, then converting these values to
hexadecimal values. Then these values are used as x and y coordinates. A new method was introduced by
Raghunandan et al. (2017) to remove the RSA algorithm drawback in terms of both integer fraction technique

E- Proceedings of The 5th International Multi-Conference on Artificial Intelligence Technology (MCAIT 2021) [167]
Artificial Intelligence in the 4th Industrial Revolution