Security of keyed DNA data embedding

The emergent field of DNA data embedding has, in
the past decade, seen the proposal of many methods to encode
data in the genome of living organisms. These algorithms have
primarily focused on incorporating error correction into encoded
data. However the security aspects of data encoded in DNA have
generally been overlooked. As with any data hiding method, information
encoded in DNA can be protected with a secret key known
only to authorized individuals. While there have been suggestions
to incorporate keys, no well defined functions for mapping keys to
parameters have been proposed yet. Furthermore there have been
no security analyses of keyed DNA data embedding methods, in
terms of quantifying how difficult it is for an attacker to find the
key. In this paper, modifications to incorporate secret keys into a
prominent embedding algorithm are proposed, and the security
is analysed under realistic attack scenarios. The algorithm to be
modified, called BioCode ncDNA has been proposed by us, and is
designed for encoding data in vivo (in the cells of living organism)
with high biocompatibility and near-optimum embedding rate.