Encryption Technique Using a Mixture of Hill Cipher and Modified DNA for Secure Data Transmission

Abstract

The 21st century has seen an explosion of information due to the quick development of technology, making information a far more crucial strategic resource. In addition, there has been a development in hackers’ ability to steal information with all their might and intelligence. Consequently, secretly transmitting information became the main concern of all agencies. Further, as classical cryptographic methods are now exposed to attacks, protecting data by a collection of steganography and cryptography techniques is becoming increasingly popular and widely adopted. Therefore, it has been determined that DNA use in cryptography could lead to new technological advancements by converting original text into an unintelligible format. In this paper, a new cryptographic technique that combines Modified DNA sequence with Hill cipher has been proposed. The proposed technique includes four phases: In the first phase, Hill cipher technology encrypts plain text into n-bit binary numbers. Second, perform XOR operations on the result, and then a key value with a length of 32 bits is added to the output of XOR. Third, Modified DNA cryptography is applied to generate ambiguity and steganography. The decryption process, which is the last phase, applies to recover the original message on the receiver side. The proposed scheme provides higher data security when compared to several existing schemes.