A Blind DNA-Steganography Approach using Ciphering and Random Sequence Splicing

The great advances in computers and computations has turned the ancient Greek art of Steganography into a hot research topic. The goal is to hide data into digital media and be imperceptible to a human observer, yet easily detectable by a computer. This paper, proposes a Steganographic method that uses DNA as a carrier of secret information which can be utilized for either authentication, or secret communication purposes. The hiding process of the proposed method consists of two main stages. The first stage uses an 8x8 play-fair ciphering algorithm to encode the secret message into a DNA sequence. The next stage blends the secret sequence into the cover sequence through a random splicing process that depends on the value of a secret key. On the other side of communication, the extraction process starts by: splitting the stego-sequence into chunks to separate both the message and the cover sequences. Then, a deciphering step is carried out to reveal the original message. This process can be done blindly without the need to the original cover sequence. When compared with other methods, the proposed method showed an outstanding performance in terms of both blindness and embedding capacity.