IJMER; ISSN: 2277-7881; IF-2.735;IC V:5.

16; Vol 3, Issue 3(10), March 2014

Securing Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) with DNA

Cryptography
Utpal Chandra De
School of Computer Application,
KIIT University,
Bhubaneswar-751024, India.
deutpal@gmail.com

Amitava Sen
School of Computer Engineering,
KIIT University,
Bhubaneswar-751024, India.
amitava57@gmail.com

Abstract A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of small low

power devices which have limited computing resources . Wireless
Sensor Networks are prone to security attacks and poses a great
security threat
for the wireless networks being used today. The present day
algorithms have shown limitations to meet the security
requirements of transmission. This paper proposes a DNA based
encryption and decryption al
gorithm. Our implementation results showed significant
improvement in complexity over other cryptographic based
algorithms. It is found that the sender needs to traverse the
complete data once for splicing the introns from the DNA. The
time complexity of the splicing process is O(n). For translation,
the PT'dna (i.e. plain text after removing spliced pattern) is
traversed only once leading to complexity O(n).
Hence, the total time complexity of the encryption process is
O(n). At the receiving end, the cipher-text is traversed once each
for both the keys to obtain the plain-text in linear time with a
total time complexity of O(n). It is analysed that if some malicious
node captures the data during the transfer between the nodes, it
can only get cipher text. The probability of obtaining plain-text
from the ciphertext is computationally infeasible even if brute
force method is applied.
Keywords: Wireless Sensor Network
Cryptography, Security, introns, exons, splice.

I.

(WSN)

DNA

INTRODUCTION

The era of Personal Computers is changing to an era of

Ubiquitous Computing. Wireless networks have succeeded as
they provide a better solution for interconnection of ubiquitous
devices[1][7]. Sensor networks, characterized by anytime,
anywhere communication[9] ; the next generation of wireless
communication systems, are an autonomous system of Sensor
routers and associated hosts that are connected by wireless
links. The approaches applied in wired networks cannot be
used for Sensor networks due to vast differences in the
characteristics of both the networks in terms of cost, power
consumption and computational abilities [8][5]. Here the
communication takes place in the ether, which has lack of
centralized monitoring and management point. In view of
above these networks are prone to attacks. Security in a

169

network based on cryptography provides several aspects such

as confidentiality, integrity, authenticity and non
repudiation[3]. DNA cryptography drawn attention after DNA
computing was first proposed by Adleman in 1994 [13]. DNA
cryptography is based on central dogmas of molecular
biology[1]. We used pseudo DNA cryptography which is
different from actual DNA cryptography. We use only the
DNA terminology and mechanisms of DNA function[2][6] not
actual biological DNA sequences (or oligos) or the sequences
generated in-vitro. The cipher and decipher processes are based
on the concepts of DNA transcription, splicing and RNA
translation[2]. The structure of the paper is organized as:
Section 2 reviews the related concepts, Section 3 describes the
proposed methodology of using DNA based Cryptography.
Section 4 discusses analysis drawn from the finndings and
Section 5 concludes the paper.
II.

RELATED W ORK

Sensor Networks are wireless, open, temporarily meshed

networks composed of a group of Sensor nodes. Each node acts
as a router and forwards packets to other nodes to reach
destination[8]. As no fixed infrastructure is required for their
establishment, they are highly self-organizing. Sensor networks
are characterized by feature of having distributed approach,
dynamic topography and peer to peer analogies. Various
Proactive routing protocols like Open Shortest Path First
(OSPF), Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV) and
Reactive i.e. on-demand protocols like Ad hoc On-demand
Distance Vector (AODV) and Hybrid routing protocols like
Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) are available which assume
collaboration between nodes so they lack any embedded
security mechanism and hence are more prone to security
attacks[5]. These attacks can either be Active attacks or Passive
attacks. Active attacks harm the network resources such as
denial of service and modify the information being transferred.
On the contrary, passive attacks without harming the network
resources acquire the information and use it for unauthorized
purposes such as releasing the message contents[4]. Modern
day Cryptography includes the process of encryption and
decryption along with the involvement of various distinct
mechanisms such as symmetric or asymmetric key
encipherment and hashing[4]. In symmetric cryptography, both

International Journal of Multidisciplinary Educational Research

IJMER; ISSN: 2277-7881; IF-2.735;IC V:5.16; Vol 3, Issue 3(10), March 2014

the encryption and decryption keys are same and need to be

exchanged between the sender and receiver beforehand.
Asymmetric cryptosystems use different keys for encryption
and decryption; the encryption key is public and decryption key
is retained by its owner. Due to considerable computational
overhead asymmetric cryptography, also referred as public key
cryptography, is considered as unsuitable for WSN. N. Gura et
al [16] compared performance of Elliptic Curve Cryptography
( ECC ) and RSA on 8-bit MCU. This work showed that a
single 160 bit prime field point multiplication of Elliptic Curve
Cryptography (ECC) needed 6.48106 clock cycles. Several
embedded computing oriented algorithms have proposed by the
researchers from cryptography field, such as HIGHT [17], SEA
[18] , and PRESENT [19]. These algorithms considered
resource constraints during design phase, so they have potential
efficiency in WSN. As they are new proposals, strong
cryptanalysis is needed to prove their security. The proposed
cryptographic algorithm follows symmetric cryptographic
scheme.

III.

PROPOSED ALGORITHM

The following algorithm provides an insight into the

process used for DNA encryption and decryption. The sender
node converts the original plain text into cipher text using the
following steps:
BEGIN
Step 1: Select the Plain Text, PT, to be sent, and convert
into an 8 bit Extended ASCII code, PTbin.
Step 2: Convert PTbin into DNA notation, say PTdna using
the following convention: A=00, T=01, G=10, C=11 where A,
T, G, C are DNA base pairs. The PTdna, as per analogy,
comprises of exons and introns.
Step 3: Select the pattern to be spliced (introns), say S from
(PTdna) where (PTdna) is the function that determines the

an equivalent amino acid using genetic code table. CASE III:

If flag= 2 then
i. Compute the complementary base to the last base in the
complementary base to the last base in

using

an equivalent amino acid using genetic code table.

Step 7: The mapping details from codon to amino acid and the
Flag value are added to the key file, K2.
END
The receiver obtains the original plain text from the cipher
text and keys using the following procedure:
BEGIN
the ( R, K2) where R is the reverse of
= R (PTamino).
Step 2: Using the value of Flag cut the appended bases from
d process of
Reverse splicing ( R, K1) such that PTdna =
Step 4: The plain text is converted into binary, PTbin form
from DNA notation.
Step 5: PTbin is in Extended ASCII with respect to original
plain text which is converted back using reverse convention.
END
The above DNA encryption decryption method can be
summarized as shown in Figure 1 below:

nS, where n is the number of the

times the pattern appears in the PTdna.
-RNA
sequence which is used for protein synthesis.
Step 4: The positions from where the pattern is spliced. The
spliced pattern and the position of splicing are added to the key
file, K1.

CASE I: If flag= 0 then

using

equivalent amino acid using genetic code table.

CASE II: If flag= 1 then
i. Compute the complementary base to the last base in the
the
compl
Figure 1: DNA encryption decryption

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International Journal of Multidisciplinary Educational Research

IJMER; ISSN: 2277-7881; IF-2.735;IC V:5.16; Vol 3, Issue 3(10), March 2014

IV.

TABLE I.

COMPLEXITY ANALYSIS

After the text Suppose the DNA form of data PTdna have the
length m. Let there be i introns and the average length of
introns be l. So the length of the data after the introns are
spliced from the DNA would be m-i*l. Since one codon
consists of 3 bases so the length of the protein form of data
would be (m-i*l)/3.
It is found that the sender needs to traverse the complete data
once for splicing the introns from the DNA. So the time
complexity of the splicing process is O(m). For translation,
y once leading to complexity
O(m). Hence, the total time complexity of the encryption
process is O(m). At the receiving end, the ciphertext is
traversed once each for both the keys to obtain the plaintext
in linear time with a total time complexity of O(m).
It is analyzed that if some malicious node captures the data
during the transfer between the nodes, it can only get cipher
text. The probability of obtaining plaintext from the
ciphertext is very low even if brute force method is applied.
a from PTamino, 20 amino acids are to be
mapped to 61 codons, thereby leading to 3 possibilities for
every amino acid on an average. So, there would be 3(mi*l)/3 total possible combinations to obtain the correct
-i*l)+1 possible
places for the insertion of intron. Every time an intron is
inserted, the number of possible places for the insertion of
intron also increases by 1. Since there are i introns, so the
total combinations for reverse splicing are (i*(2(mi*l)+i+1)/2), which is of the order O(m). As the number of
introns and their length decreases, the time complexity of
reverse splicing will decrease but the time complexity of
reverse translation will increase. Hence the total possible
combinations for the decryption using brute force are (3(mi*l)/3*3* i*(2(m-i*l)+i+1)/2), which is of order O(3m), thus
requiring very large computational time to decipher the
plaintext. Also, the dynamic nature of nodes does not allow
brute force attacks to become successful due to large number
of possible permutations. Further the brute force attacks fail
in this scenario because the pattern that is to be spliced off
varies with the plaintext.

THE PERFORMANCE OF APPLICATION WITH DIFFERENT

LENGTH OF PLAINTEXT

Data
Set

Size of
Plain Text
(bytes)
10

Size of
Cipher
Text
43

Size of
keys
(bytes)
97

1
2

100

315

1000

10000

TABLE II.

Encryption
Time(ms)

Decription
Time (ms)

243

419

664

244

425

3298

4901

289

463

33324

47511

1283

1384

THE PERFORMANCE OF ALGORITHM WITH PLAINTEXT OF DI

ERENT CONTEXT

Data Set

Alphabates only

Different
Character
Set
52

Numerical characters

30

100

Special characters

33

100

Combination of
characters
Combination of
Characters

85

100

Description

4
5

VI.

Decription
Success Rate
in %
100

154

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

The vulnerability of Sensor networks to attacks makes

security one of the major issues in data transmission. The
proposed algorithm is analyzed to be strong enough as the
permutations required by a brute force attack are suficiently
high to decipher the message being sent across the Sensor
network. It can be concluded from the various analysis that the
proposed DNA-based cryptosystem promises to be a better
solution for implementation in securing the Sensor networks.
Further, this method can be incorporated as a hardware
solution. However, the limited computational ability of the
nodes in Sensor networks is still an issue, which can be worked
upon in future.
REFERENCES

V.

RESULT

The proposed algorithm is implemented using GNU C, the

configuration of the system used is Core 2 Duo processor/ 2
GB RAM / 4 MB cache. The results of the program have
been summarised in Table 1 and Table 2. Table 1 shows the
performance of proposed algorithm with different sets of
plaintext varying in context and length. Table 2 shows the
performance of the proposed algorithm on different sets of
data, highly diverse in nature covering wide range of
Extended ASCII characters.

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