Novel Method for DNA-Based Elliptic Curve Cryptography for IoT Devices

Abstract

Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) can achieve relatively good security with a smaller key length, making it suitable for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. DNA-based encryption has also been proven to have good security. To develop a more secure and stable cryptography technique, we propose a new hybrid DNA-encoded ECC scheme that provides multilevel security. The DNA sequence is selected, and using a sorting algorithm, a unique set of nucleotide groups is assigned. These are directly converted to binary sequence and then encrypted using the ECC; thus giving double-fold security. Using several examples, this paper shows how this complete method can be realized on IoT devices. To verify the performance, we implement the complete system on the embedded platform of a Raspberry Pi 3 board, and utilize an active sensor data input to calculate the time and energy required for different data vector sizes. Connectivity and resilience analysis prove that DNA-mapped ECC can provide better security compared to ECC alone. The proposed method shows good potential for upcoming IoT technologies that require a smaller but effective security system.