DNA Encryption

brn writes "There is this BBC article that talks about hiding information inside the DNA. Very interesting and well worth a read, apparently information hidden this way is virtually undetectable. " It's the espionage agencies that first got interested, but the notion of "watermarking" is another that is brought up-and you thought PIII ids were bad.

Comments

Re:DNA Storage Capacity

[hey!]

According to the human genome project, they will be establishing markers every 100K (1x10^5) base pairs, and will need 30K (3x10^4) of these markers.

That works out to 3 billion (3x10^9) base pairs.

Each base pair is made up of one or two pairs of units; if we distinguish sense from antisense strands in the DNA, this means we can encode four values (or two bits) of information per base pair, working out to 6x10^9 bits, or a little more than 5.5 GB (note that since only one side of a strand is used in life, this means you can spell "human" in the genetic sense in less than 2.5 Gbits).

As somebody else pointed out, this scheme is not encryption, but a method of information smuggling. That is, instead of using it to send secure messages over an insecure channel, the technique is supposed to hide the fact that a message even exists.

Although virtually undetectable by casual inspection, it's hard to think of a practical application of this technology because of the effort and equipment needed to extract the message. Sending detailed plans for sabotage to your terrorist cell this way seems impractical, unless your terrorists are biologists with lots of time on their hands.