Secure Storage of High Volume of Digital Data in DNA Domain

With the voluminous increase in the amount of data in this era, there is a dire need for a suitable medium to store them, for which DNA is coming up as an emerging technology. However, this data should not only be stored efficiently so as to reduce the cost of storage, but also be protected against malicious use. In this paper, we propose a DNA-based lossless compression-encryption algorithm for a highly efficient and secure storage of data. Huffman coding proves to be one of the efficient compression algorithms, which is first used to compress the data. This data is then converted into a sequence of DNA nucleotides using DNA Encoding Rules. These obtained sequences are then secured with the help of DNA-based Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) using a DNA-based symmetric key. The proposed algorithm works efficiently for text and image data and proves to give a better compression ratio than the existing algorithms. The encrypted data is secure against various cryptography attacks, and the original data can only be recovered by the knowledge of correct initial vectors and symmetric key.