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The Emerging Science of DNA Cryptography
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)."
My Word doc becomes porn.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
...is called BUKKAKE.
It uses multiple DNA streams to encrypt all data.
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Well I process my DNA in two stages, like that. But then I've always been a eukaryote.
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.
Test your net with Netalyzr
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.
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.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
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...
It's a direct match to the signal in Qatar!
Cut all server hardlines now!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
The person who wrote the original article obviously understood nothing of basic molecular biology or cryptography. If he or she did, they might have noticed that viruses break this type of coding all of the time by bypassing several stages of the cellular machinery. Granted they use a blunt force attack (the equivalent of a substitution cypher)and not something more ingenious, but it works. If a virus is only successful on its final attempt (the best case scenario), it can crack the code after about 3x10^50 iterations. Now imagine if a virus was intelligently designed (I'm not getting into that discussion here) and had the ability to complete an iteration (or operation) in a billionth of a second - how long do you think it would take for it to find the correct "RNA sequence" and bypass the "ribosome machinery" stage altogether?
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
In Soviet Russia, DNA encodes you!
wait.. what?
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.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The "emerging science of DNA cryptography", my ass. See Laxitive for an informative post that should have scored a 5.
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.
The suggestion to "encrypt" things in proteins, suggesting that they're a one-way code, is absurd. We've been able to sequence proteins since the 1950s by Edman degradation. From which you can relatively easily back out possible DNA sequences. Enumerating the possible mRNAs leading to a given protein sequence is a trivial task for any Perl programmer with three minutes to spare. Either the people who came up with this scheme know nothing about cryptography, or nothing about biology. As for the "massively parallel" computing DNA allows, true, it does, but since you're dealing with physical systems, it quickly becomes impractical. If you have to synthesize and mix bathtub-sized quantities of DNA in order to perform even modest calculations (that you can likely do faster and more easily on a desktop computer anyway), this method becomes expensive and cumbersome long before you reach the point where you can actually crack keys that are interesting.
Maybe somebody already did it, a long time ago. Maybe we should be looking for secret messages from space aliens in our own DNA. Maybe...
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.
... the key is in your privates!
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 is transmit the ciphertext. The proposed scheme is at best a steganographic technique. Calling it in encryption is down right false.
The author basically proposes the following code. Write down your message as a bit string. Translate the bit string from binary to base 4. (interpret it as DNA). Remove random chunks at random positions from it (i.e. the introns), and express the remaining DNA it as a protein. The encryption "key" are the introns and the position of the introns.
Sounds pretty much like BS to me.
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, so that we can ignore the next 100 million stories posted on /. that offer status updates on the most elementary of quantum computers, and what it means for the nude pictures you're e-mailing to someone you've never met in person...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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...