An Improved DNA Cryptography Using Residue Number System

In this information rich era, data protection is needed to ensure swift and secure communication through a digital medium. Data need to be protected from unauthorized access and transmitted to the intended receiver with confidentiality, availability, integrity and authenticity. Several schemes have been proposed over the years toward ensuring that data sent over a digital medium is difficult to understand by an intruder by hiding or transforming the data from a plain-text to a DNA based form which is sent as the cipher-text. Although, some of the schemes performed to a certain level but high computational time is the problem of most of these techniques. Therefore, this research presented a method that incorporate cryptography in securing the data using residue number system and DNA cryptography. Firstly, residue number system is used in order to reduce the computational time by encrypting plain-text into a residue form, using the moduli set {2n-1, 2n, 2n+1}, then convert the residue to a DNA format. The DNA cryptography was done to hide the existence of the encrypted DNA by using two different reference sequence randomly generated. The proposed scheme produces the cipher text in both an encrypted and encoded DNA based form, which takes less computational time and attracts less attention of intruders.