An Improved DNA based Encryption Algorithm for Internet of Things Devices

Abstract

The widespread of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications creates an urgent need to protect data generated from these applications. These applications generate sensitive data transmitted through the wireless network. Furthermore, IoT devices are perceived as limited devices due to inadequate computation resources, such as memory, processing capabilities, and power. These challenges regarding the IoT devices are considered a drawback when trying to encrypt the transmitted data using classical encryption methods. Therefore, we proposed an enhanced lightweight encryption algorithm based on the DNA sequence to be sufficient to overcome the limited IoT device's computational resources. In the enhanced algorithm, the DNA sequence's random nature was exploited to generate an encryption secret key. The secret key is used during substitution and transposition operations to encrypt IoT-generated data that is suitable for the IoT computational resources. The experimental result of the enhanced DNA algorithm shows remarkable outcomes regarding key size, encryption time, and proportion of distortion compared with other encryption algorithms.