Hiding Information in DNA Sequence Data using Open Reading Frame Guided Splicing

Article history: Received: 02 February, 2021 Accepted: 04 May, 2021 Online: 20 May, 2021 Encouraged by the huge publicly available genomic databases, research in the field of steganography was recently extended to utilize DNA sequence data to conceal secret information. As an extension of the work presented earlier by the author, this paper proposes an approach for a secure data communication channel between two parties. At one side of the communication, the sender starts the hiding process by encrypting the secret message using a bio-inspired 8x8 play-fair ciphering algorithm. Next, the secret sequence is randomly spliced and merged into the cover sequence replacing its non-coding regions. Using the secret key shared in advance, the receiver, on the other side of communication, can extract and concatenate the segments of the encrypted message and reveals the original message after deciphering. The method was proven to be robust to brute-force attacks while providing a hiding capacity up to two bit-per-nucleotide. A comparison with some existing techniques showed that the proposed method outperforms most of them not only in terms of the hiding capacity but also for the feature of blind extraction.