The Emerging Science of DNA Cryptography 46
KentuckyFC writes "Since the mid 90s, researchers have been using DNA to carry out massively parallel calculations which threaten encryption schemes such as DES. Now one researcher says that if DNA can be used to attack encryption schemes, it can also protect data too. His idea is to exploit the way information is processed inside a cell to encrypt it. The information that DNA holds is processed in two stages in a cell. In the first stage, called transcription, a DNA segment that constitutes a gene is converted into messenger RNA (mRNA) which floats out of the nucleus and into the body of the cell. Crucially, this happens only after the noncoding parts of the gene have been removed and the remaining sequences spliced back together." (More below.)
KentuckyFC continues: "In the second stage, called translation, molecular computers called ribosomes read the information that mRNA carries and use it to assemble amino acids into proteins. The key point is that this is a one way process. Information can be transferred from the DNA to the protein but not back again because during the process various details are lost, such as the places where the noncoding sequences have been removed. The new idea behind DNA cryptography is to exploit this to encrypt a message. The message is encoded in the sequence of bases in the DNA (A for 00, C for 01, G for 10, T for 11, for example) and then processed. The resulting protein is then made public. The key, which is kept private, is the information necessary to reassemble the DNA from the protein, such as the position of the noncoding regions (abstract)."
And when the cell mutates... (Score:5, Funny)
My Word doc becomes porn.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Evolutionist: A virus or other organism will evolve to decode on the fly
Creationist: God made this secret. No man shall decode it. The church shall interpret divinely for you
One of the best encryption schemes... (Score:1, Funny)
...is called BUKKAKE.
It uses multiple DNA streams to encrypt all data.
Re: (Score:2)
DNA DECODER V 1.92
>Decoding... [########100%########]
>Message decoded.
>Message reads as follows:
>THERE IS SOMETHING UNPLEASANT ON MY FACE STOP
>PLEASE GET ME A TOWEL STOP
organic computing by any other name... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's still organic computing. We've already demonstrated that there are some classes of computational problems that are massively parallel and can benefit from the use of organic instead of synthetic design. This is decades-old news. The problem is doing this on a mass and automated scale, and then figuring out how to reintegrate these systems into the digital ones we use now. Digital systems are very fast, but lack capacity. Organic systems are very slow, but have incredible capacity. What's needed is a bridge between these two developing systems. The good news is... Research on organic computing has been very slow... people are far more interested in silicon right now, so there's no real rush.
Re: (Score:2)
That was a result of a design flaw. They just had to build another. Some things take time. And iterations.
Anyway, the answer happened to be correct in base 13 -- that's got to count for something.
Sounds stupidly brittle... (Score:2, Insightful)
This sounds amazingly,stupidly brittle. When it comes down to it, it looks like some variant of a substitution cypher. Now I'm not a cryptographer, but I'm pretty sure blowing this thing out of the water would be a good exercise for a grad-school Crypto class.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sounds stupidly brittle... (Score:5, Informative)
On the subject of vulnerabilities, this method, as admitted in the paper, is a symmetric substitution cipher. You still need a secure channel to perform key exchange (the key here contains the locations and lengths of spliced out introns). If an eavesdropper gets ahold of the protein (ciphertext), a simple lookup of codons gets the eavesdropper back to the post-spliced RNA. The unique challenge of this cipher is to determine where splicing occured in order to get back to the pre-spliced RNA (which is a simple complement of the DNA sequence, which in turn is an easy substitution cipher away from the plaintext). While a clever way to implement it, the intron splicing in this method is really no different than the mechanisms used to confuse plaintexts in block ciphers like DES, and it is subject to the same vulnerabilities like differential attack.
Re: (Score:1)
Actually it works more like a block cipher.
Ever heard of AES [wikipedia.org]?
technology review completely wrong (Score:1)
They are not using DNA to perform cryptography (or any thing else).
from the original abstract:
In this project, We do not intended to utilize real DNA to perform the cryptography process; rather, We will introduce a new cryptography method based on central dogma of molecular biology. Since this method simulates some critical processes in central dogma, it is a pseudo DNA cryptography method.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Do you come here often?
Re: (Score:1)
yes, he right away knew that nobody read TFA and that another abstract was nothing but in place here (:
btw, I didn't think they were doing cryptocells..
Self promotion (Score:5, Informative)
Every link related to this is apparently owned by this group/person arxiv. The details are far too sparse to make much sense of, but as far as I can tell, the approach is:
I have to assume some additional manipulation of the transcribed message so you aren't just giving Eve large segments of your message for free, but even then, it seems like a hell of a lot of work to disguise yet another scheme to protect data via the magic transmission of additional secret data.
Anyone see where I misread this? Even if we assume that the "DNA" is the key and not the message, I'm still not seeing how you avoid the "magic" step.
Re:Self promotion (Score:5, Informative)
If you've gone that far, you may as well use a one-time pad. At least then you only have to deal with magically transmitting an amount of data equal to the message. In addition, you could bulk transmit a whole bunch of pads, while this technique prevents you from coming up with the secret until you already have a message ready to send.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
arxiv is a scientific prepublishing server. Scientists put papers up there for reference/review.
The method does seem rather "a biologist's first try at encryption".
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I always assumed Bob would be giving DNA to Alice, not the other way around.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
There's your magic right there. Oh Bob's gonna get lucky tonight!
Drat... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
That would be a very poor private key then...
I got something just as good (Score:2)
For a minute I thought I was hoing to be able to encrypt/decrypt my hard drive by my computer taking a sample of my blood...
<Deep, dark voice> You can have even better protection against the RIAA goons if you give up just a small sliver of your soul...
I think I've seen this one (Score:2)
Cut all server hardlines now!
Interesting, but not too exciting (Score:5, Insightful)
Couple notes for people who haven't read the paper:
1. Their scheme is not in-vivo (they're not actually working with DNA and proteins). It's a computational process that is based on the information transformations that occur inside a cell.
2. It's kind of cute and nifty, but not particularly applicable. They discuss weaknesses in the attack, but in a pretty handwavey way. The core problem is that their "encrypted text" will include their entire plain text, just split up into pieces. Secondly, it doesn't seem to offer anything particularly new when compared to traditional block ciphers.
3. Mathematically, this has nothing to do with biology. It's just loosely based on biological processes, and it's not really clear that these biological processes have anything particular to contribute to development of encryption. Transcription is just a mapping (from genomic DNA to mRNA), and translation is just a lossy mapping (from 3-tuples of mRNA to peptides). Mathematicians and cryptographers have been aware of generalized versions of these functions these for a long time (homomorphisms and reverse homomorphisms). There's not much new being introduced here.
-Laxitive
snake oil (Score:2, Informative)
Choice example quote:
If key size is already proportional to ciphertext size then why not simply do OTP. That already gives provable information theoretic security. Then you don't need any extra privacy provided by the "DNA Encryption". All you need to do i
Re: (Score:2)
I had the same impression, except I didn't want to say it in quite the direct way you did. I'm not in crypto.. I just have a math/cs degree and work in biotech. The whole thing seemed kind of hokey to me, but I don't have the expertise to dissect it properly from a crypto perspective.
I'm using my DNA, to crack your DNA! (Score:3, Insightful)
At least that of those who run the secure system.
Seriously. Nowadays it's far easier to just do a little social engineering (partially scripted) than to try to break any encryption scheme. Even the highest security company has some stupid grunts and drones.
They should fix the weakest link in the chain first.
I learned something important, when I programmed my first GUI program for a large client: If they can do something wrong, they *will*.
The only solution, is to not give them any functionality that they could mis-use. Build your UI and your backend API like a deep packet inspecting firewall.
Then, when that works, start to think about other ways to strengthen it.
Already Done (Score:1)
Star Trek Next Generation, Season 6, "The Chase"
Message encrypted using DNA (actually the message was encoded in DNA.
Still one of my favorite scenes when the Klingons express their disappointment to find out that the result of all their work is a new age message of peace.
Re: (Score:1)
Please don't describe things that didn't happen as having been done. It makes everybody dumber.
This is stupid (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe this idea isn't new. (Score:3, Funny)
Ask... (Score:2)
Ask a Down Syndrome patient or another person with some problem or sickness caused by DNA how well cells behave in every day life.
This story is very shaky.
Let's get it over with... (Score:2)
The threat of "quantum computers" seems to be the way to justify any crazy thing you want to do, these days. Even though, in reality, it's no threat at all.
There are plenty of theoretically secure encryption algorithms out there, even now, which aren't threatened by quantum, or any other kind of theoretical computer. Let's just all switch to using Lamport signatures [wikipedia.org], so that we can ignore the next 100 million stories posted on /. that offer status updates on the most eleme