Secure Image Steganography by Utilizing DNA Properties

In the last period, Steganography is commonly used as an alternative to encryption to achieve secret communication between parties. Many methods have emerged to achieve steganography, including the use of spatial domain, spread spectrum, transform domain, and etc. On the other hand, the methods of attackers have also developed in revealing hidden data and trying to retrieve it. To increase the security of the hiding process, some researchers have found hybrid methods that combine encryption and steganography processes. The research aims to present a new method in steganography by taking advantage of the properties of DNA, which includes the random sequence of nitrogenous bases (A, C, G, T), the process of hybridization, which occurs between two single strands of DNA to form a double strand of DNA so that the bases in the first strand are complementary to the nitrogenous bases in the second strand. The research includes the following steps: First, the secret image to be hidden is encrypted by encoding it into a series of nitrogenous bases, and then the XOR process is performed with a nitrogenous bases sequence for a DNA tape agreed upon between the sender and recipient, the hybridization process applied before and after the XOR process. The results show that encrypted image is much different from the original image and thus they added another level of security to the hidden image. Secondly, the encrypted image resulting from the first step is hidden in the cover image and using a new method based on the use of the agreed-upon DNA tape as a key.