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Revision as of 09:56, 23 August 2016

Team:Edinburgh/Part Collection - 2015.igem.org
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Team:Edinburgh/Part Collection

Introduction

Nowadays, security constitues a very big issue and need for all your devices, app, computers and so on. Also, for our system.The reason behind why we want to encrypt our data is that on a large scale, meaning a lot of people are using our system and algorithms to encode and decode text, the information might get stolen. The algorithms and procedure will be open source, so everyone can have access to it. In this case, if you send a DNA message to a friend, someone can steal it, decode it and visualize the information provided. In the case of shipping information in DNA, it is quite risky if another party finds out about it. Our main usages of storing text into DNA are: storing data as archive and sending DNA messages. We consider that in both cases if the DNA is stolen most people with a biology lab can decrypt the message.



Another threat can be discovered at the stage when the user wants to decode the DNA sequence into text. Because at this stage your DNA is into a computer which is linked to a network, the risk is quite high of being stolen. We indeed see that the system requests some security measures in order to keep data safe. In conclusion, the ‘threat’ is someone stealing the information when the DNA is sent to a different person or the archive data. In this way, the value of the data might be of high importance, so we need to find a way of protecting it, because our stored data needs to be secure.

What we are using is:
Suggestion of using a cryptographic library or function, not building one. After a few meetings with computer security professors, all of them suggested to apply a Stream cipher. We adapted this Stream Cipher to base 4, in order to apply a key on DNA sequences. The only thing that we must take into account is that we need a different key for each sentence in order to make it harder to be cracked. Use RSA in order to encrypt and decrypt the key used as a seed. Use the seed in the random generating function in order to have the exact range of numbers as keys which you will going to use to encrypt the text.