International Journal of Information Management 32 (2012) 175–181 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect International Journal of Information Management j our nal ho me p age: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijinfomgt DNA-like linguistic secret sharing for strategic information systems Marek R. Ogiela ∗ , Urszula Ogiela AGH University of Science and Technology, Al. Mickiewicza 30, PL-30-059 Krakow, Poland a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Available online 20 December 2011 Keywords: Information management Secret sharing protocols Mathematical linguistics a b s t r a c t The development of DNA cryptography has contributed to the ability of solving many computation- ally difficult problems by offering the capability of executing calculations in parallel. This capability is used particularly in solving NP-complete problems or implementing cryptography and steganography solutions. Biological computation models based on bonds between nitrogen bases in nucleic acid chains that make up DNA structures can also be used to develop new solutions for smart information manage- ment. This study discusses new secret splitting techniques based on mathematical linguistic methods and designed for intelligently managing secret data within hierarchical structures. These techniques make use of information coding models found in the coding of DNA sequences. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The development of artificial intelligence techniques has sig- nificantly improved the capability of solving a number of difficult problems using advanced algorithms and methods inspired by biological models. One such interesting subject is the intelligent management of important or classified data that is held by various companies, corporations, institutions or organizations. The method of classifying this data as well as ensuring its integrity and authen- ticity has represented and still represents the fundamental issue connected with managing such data (ElGamal, 1985; Menezes, van Oorschot, & Vanstone, 2001). In modern computer systems and also in advanced management models, these characteristics can be achieved by using sophisticated cryptographic methods and proto- cols. Although these techniques are secure (unbreakable) from the point of view of the information theory and the complexity theory, their application is often limited to the narrow field of confiden- tial data distribution within a small group of users. Yet in wide management structures, it may be necessary to set up many inde- pendent levels of management of specific data, split depending on the access rights to this data of persons who will hold it. This can be achieved by the independent application of cryptographic meth- ods of threshold splitting of information, introduced by Shamir and Blakley in late 1970s (Adleman, 1994; Shamir, 1979). Threshold information splitting techniques have many advantages and can be applied to any type of data stored in the digital form (images, sound, text, etc.). Yet they are also subject to certain limitations ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +48 12 617 38 54; fax: +48 12 634 15 68. E-mail address: mogiela@agh.edu.pl (M.R. Ogiela). due mainly to the fact that in the majority of cases these methods generate equal shadows or shares of the information. What such procedures cannot guarantee is the selective access to the shared data, based on access rights which may differ depending on the level of authority or privilege of the participant of the given protocol. So in order to create such hierarchical access in which every level will have different access rights and abilities to recreate the split secret, it is necessary to enhance the known methods of threshold splitting of information so that they would support varied splits depending on the position in the management structure. This study proposes a method for developing new solutions in this field, referred to as lin- guistic threshold schemes. They make use of traditional procedures of threshold splitting of secrets enhanced with an additional stage at which information is coded using context-free formal grammars. Such linguistic formalisms make it possible to re-code the shared secret and create its new linguistic presentation, which then under- goes the splitting procedure. The grammar introduced makes it possible to create various representations depending on the level in the management structure and the access rights of the people involved in the information splitting and reconstruction protocol. The method of recoding the original data into a new linguistic rep- resentation is based on converting bit blocks of various lengths. The parameter determining the data block size can be changed depend- ing on the level of the hierarchical structure at which the secret is split. The method itself of recoding bit values of the secret into a new linguistic representation makes use of solutions found in DNA cryptography, in which the encrypted data can be stored in the form of sequences of nucleotides (nitrogen bases) or the bonds between them (Gehani, LaBean, & Reif, 2000). Such information storage models allow single bits or their pairs to be coded by sub- sequent bases found in the DNA molecule chain. Lower down in the article the coding model used, based on the storage of information 0268-4012/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2011.11.016