VOL. 11, NO. 13, JULY 2016 ISSN 1819-6608 ARPN Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences ©2006-2016 Asian Research Publishing Network (ARPN). All rights reserved. www.arpnjournals.com 8049 PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF HARDWARE IMPLEMENTED DNA ALGORITHM FOR SECURITY APPLICATIONS A. Ruhan Bevi, Kathan Patel and S. Malarvizhi Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, SRM University, Kattankulathur, India E-Mail: ruhan.b@ktr.srmuniv.ac.in ABSTRACT DNA Cryptography is used for secure end to end communication over a network by encrypting the messages. DNA is a well-known information carrier from one generation to another. DNA cryptography is preferred due to vast parallelism and information density that are inherent in any DNA molecule. In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed based on DNA cryptography, which enhances the security aspects of the data which is sent over a network. This is achieved by introducing feistel inspired structure and adding complex operations to it. Furthermore, this paper discusses DNA cryptosystem concepts based on the classic Vigenere cipher for substitution. A random function is used for generating One Time Password, which is unique for every transaction. This makes the algorithm complex and prevents the attackers to perform any brute force attacks. The results indicates that the confidentiality and integrity of the data is maintained and the feistel inspired structure for DNA cryptography using one time pad for key generation achieves a better encryption rate. Keywords: DNA, Cryptography, DNA sequences, random function, one time pad, encryption. 1. INTRODUCTION With the growing pace of Internet and network technology day by day, the security threats are also increasing due to lot of information flow on the network. There are various kinds of attackers/adversaries who always try to break into the system either to retrieve the crucial information or to destroy the integrity of data. So, the information security becomes necessary for modern computing systems. Generally, the secret data hiding techniques are used to protect the data from the adversaries. Cryptography and steganography are most common and widely used methods to prevent data from invaders. Cryptography performs the encryption of the data whereas Steganography hides the data from the hacker. In Cryptography, the encryption and decryption of data /plaintext is done with the help of key which may be shared public/private. Increasing the bit size of encryption reduces the risk of being attacked. A 512 bit encryption seemed to be safe compared to 64/128 bit encryption. So, with the failure of modern cryptographic algorithm like DES and MD5, new methods of information security are needed to protect the data. Efforts are taken continuously to improve the encryption methods while staying within the limits of available technology. In the process of cryptography, the algorithm and the key play vital role to ascertain the secrecy of data while saving or passing it over the unsafe networks like internet. This is done in order to secure the data from the black hat hackers/adversaries and make it understandable only to its intended receiver. The general process of cryptography involving both encryption and decryption is shown in the Figure-1. Figure-1. Flow diagram of cryptography. In this paper, section 2 deals with the related works. Section 3 deals with DNA cryptography where DNA sequences, its properties and the concepts of DNA coding are discussed. The proposed method is conferred in section 4 with experimental results listed in section 5.Discussions on performance and security analysis is done in section 6. Conclusions are drawn in section 7. 2. RELATED WORK In 1994, Adleman [1] proposed solution of Hamiltonian path problem using DNA. This resulted into the discovery of new field of research known as bio- computing. In 2006, Sherif T. Amin et al. [2] proposed the DNA cryptographic approach based on symmetric key, where key sequences are obtained from the genetic database and remain same at both ends while sending and receiving. Message/plaintext is first converted into binary format and then into a DNA format using substitution. Once the substitution has been performed and message is in the form of DNA sequence, a quadruple is chosen from the sequence obtained and a match is done with the key sequence. The position of match is used for encrypting/retrieving the message. Random position for each character in the plaintext are obtained this way and the file which contains these positions are defined ciphertext which is send to the receiver where decryption is performed in reverse order.