Hash Based DNA Computing Algorithm for Image Encryption

Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) computing has demonstrated great potential in data encryption due to its capability of parallel computation, minimal storage requirement, and unbreakable cryptography. Focusing on high-dimensional image data for encryption with DNA computing, we propose a novel hash encoding-based DNA computing algorithm, which consists of a DNA hash encoding module and content-aware encrypting module. Inspired by the significant properties of the hash function, we build a quantity of hash mappings from image pixels to DNA computing bases, properly integrating the advantages of the hash function and DNA computing to boost performance. Considering the correlation relationship of pixels and patches for modeling, a content-aware encrypting module is proposed to reorganize the image data structure, resisting the crack with non-linear and high dimensional complexity originating from the correlation relationship. The experimental results suggest that the proposed method performs better than most comparative methods in key space, histogram analysis, pixel correlation, information entropy, and sensitivity measurements.