Anti-attacks encryption algorithm based on DNA computing and data encryption standard

Data Encryption Standard (DES) is the first 56-bits secret-key standard that is widely used as a symmetric-key 64-bits block encryption/decryption algorithm. Unfortunately, the rapid increase in computing power makes it possible to find the required bits combination of the secret-key in a short time. Due to the promising trends of Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) in cryptography, this paper presents a DES-DNA based symmetric-key block encryption/decryption algorithm called iEncrypt. iEncrypt has two versions, each of them uses a 64-nucleotides secret-key that makes the secret-key of the proposed algorithm intractable as 128-bits secret-key. The experimental works show that the two versions of iEncrypt are intractable against brute force attacks. Moreover, the reduced version of the proposed algorithm, to 4-rounds, shows the intractability of the first version against differential cryptanalysis attacks in addition to the invisibility of attacking the second version. Plain images data are used as one of the rich characteristics data in the statistical evaluation. Statistically, the encrypted images confirm the intractability of both versions of the proposed algorithm.