A molecular cryptography model based on structures of DNA self-assembly

With the progress of DNA computing, DNA-based cryptography becomes an emerging interdisciplinary research field. In this paper, we present a novel DNA cryptography that takes advantage of DNA self-assembled structure. Making use of the toehold strands recognition and strand displacement, the bit-wise exclusive-or (XOR) operation is carried out to fulfill the information encryption and decryption in the form of a one-time-pad. The security of this system mainly comes from the physical isolation and specificity of DNA molecules. The system is constructed by using complex DNA self-assembly, in which technique of fluorescent detection is utilized to implement the signal processing. In the proposed DNA cryptography, the XOR operation at each bit is carried out individually, thus the encryption and decryption process could be conducted in a massive, parallel way. This work may demonstrate that DNA cryptography has the great potential applications in the field of information security.