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RESEARCH PAPERS
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SCIENCE CHINA
Information Sciences
March 2010 Vol. 53 No. 3: 506–514
doi: 10.1007/s11432-010-0063-3
c
Science China Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010 info.scichina.com www.springerlink.com
Asymmetric encryption and signatu re method with
DNA t echnology
LAI XueJia
1†
, LU MingXin
2†∗
, QIN Lei
3
, HAN JunSong
4
& FANG XiWen
1
1
Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200030, China;
2
School of National Information Security, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China;
3
BIOCOMPLEX, 4915 Bathurst St. Unit# 209-366, ON M2R 1X9, Canada;
4
National Engineering Center for BioChip at Shanghai, Shanghai 201203, China
Received July 14, 2009; accepted February 22, 2010
Abstract This paper proposes DNA-PKC, an asymmetric encryption and si gnature cryptosystem by combin-
ing the technologies of genetic engineering and cryptology. It is an exploratory research of biological cryptology.
Similar to conventional public-key cryptology, DNA-PKC uses two pair s of keys for encryption and signature,
resp ectively. Using the public encryption key, everyone can send encrypted message to a specified user, only the
owner of the private decryption key can decrypt the ciphertext and recover the message; in the signature scheme,
the owner of the private signing key can generate a signature that can be verified by other users with the public
verification key, but no else can forge the signature. DNA-PKC differs from the conventional cryptology in that
the keys and the ciphertexts are all biological molecules. The security of DNA-PKC relies on di fficult biological
problems instead of computational problems; thus DNA-PKC is immune from known attacks, especially the
quantum computing based attacks.
Keywords cryptology, asymmetric encryption, digital signature, biological cryptology, DNA
Citation Lai X J, Lu M X, Qin L, et al. Asymmetric encryption and signature method with DNA technology.
Sci China Inf Sci, 2010, 53: 506–514, doi: 10.1007/s11432-010-0063-3
1 Int roduction
Cryptography is a branch of science which studies the encoding of information for the purpose of hiding
messages. The development of cryptography is strongly related to human’s information-processing capa-
bilities and computing capacities. When the electronic computer technology is approaching the physical
limit, people turn themselves to the study of new computation technologies which might profoundly
influence the development of cryptology in the future. Biological computing (e.g. DNA computing)
and quantum c omputing are two most promis ing technologies under development. However, new crypto
technology does not always follow the development in novel computation technology. Since Wisner [1]
first proposed the premature idea of quantum cryptology in the 1970s, the quantum cryptology has been
studied for nearly 40 years. Today, quantum cryptology is still far from changing the domination of the
conventional c ryptology, while significant progres ses have been achieved in the field of quantum commu-
nication [2– 5]. Although quantum computing is also a potential threat to current cry pto logy, there is still
*Corresponding author (email: mxlu@nju.edu.cn)
† These authors contributed equally to this work