DNA-Inspired Lightweight Cryptographic Algorithm for Secure and Efficient Image Encryption

As IoT devices proliferate in critical areas like healthcare or nuclear safety, it necessitates the provision of cryptographic solutions with security and computational efficiency. Very well-established encryption mechanisms such as AES, RC4, and XOR cannot strike a balance between speed, energy consumption, and robustness. Moreover, most DNA-based solutions are not cognizant of the hardware limitations of IoT platforms such as Arduino R3. This paper proposes an improved encryption technique incorporating stochastic DNA-inspired processing with optical computing in a resource-constrained environment. The proposed algorithm employs stochastic pixel selection with DNA-encoded key generation and is further enhanced by parallel optical processing to overcome the trade-offs of conventional techniques during implementation. Experimental trials performed on Arduino R3 established superior performance in terms of an encryption time of 3956 μs and memory usage of 773 bytes, placing it ahead of AES and XOR-based approaches. Apart from the tests performed, security analyses have revealed a strong resistant position upon differential cryptanalysis (DP = 0.051) and linear cryptanalysis (LP = 0.045), with an almost-ideal key entropy (7.99 bits/key) and minimal autocorrelation (0.018). This research offers practical applications in real-time medical monitoring and nuclear radiation detection systems by closing the existing gap in hardware-aware DNA cryptography.