A hybrid cryptographic scheme for secure communication
Salman Ali, Faisal Anwer · 2025
The ever-growing volume of data exchanged in the interconnected digital world necessitates robust security measures during communication. While technological advancements offer benefits, they also empower attackers with ever-more sophisticated methods to exploit vulnerabilities. To address this challenge, cryptography offers a mechanism for ensuring data security via confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity. DNA cryptography is an exciting area of research that involves hiding information by encoding it as a DNA sequence. Its increasing popularity is due to its faster performance, lower storage requirements, and reduced power consumption. Implementing DNA cryptography alone is challenging due to the absence of a robust theoretical foundation and the ease with which its techniques can be implemented. This work introduces an advanced method that combines DNA cryptography with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) for data encryption during communications and the Genetic Algorithm (GA) for key generation. This approach overcomes the challenges associated with relying simply on DNA cryptography. Connectivity and resilience analysis demonstrate that DNA-mapped AES offers superior security compared to DNA alone. This proposed method holds significant promise for emerging technologies like IoT, which need compact yet efficient security solutions.