Towards a secure DNA-based cipher

Yash Makwana

doi:10.1016/j.jisa.2026.104546

Towards a secure DNA-based cipher

2026-06-16

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DOI：10.1016/j.jisa.2026.104546

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DNA-based Cryptography has emerged as an alternative way of encryption, and, along with chaotic maps, it extends its capabilities even further. Employing these schemes without rigorous mathematical scrutiny poses significant security risks. In 2021, Al-Husainy et al. presented a DNA-based encryption scheme using matrix and XOR operations. In this paper, we present a complete key recovery attack with linear time complexity on this DNA-based encryption scheme and also prove that for this scheme, there exist two secret keys for each plaintext-ciphertext pair, i.e., the ciphers exhibit key collision. This attack can determine an N-bit key in O(N) time, whereas a brute-force attack requires O(2N) time, illustrating a substantial efficiency gain. We propose a new DNA-based Stream Cipher, BioSNOW, built upon tested designs and primitives for their corresponding ciphers. Moreover, most research in image encryption employs very complex operations to encrypt images, which often results in a high computational cost. Stream ciphers allow us to use computationally efficient operations for their Image Encryption functions. We present the evaluation for the robustness and security of BioSNOW and its application to Image Cryptography.

Towards a secure DNA-based cipher

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