A novel data hiding method based on deoxyribonucleic acid coding

The paper proposes a new data hiding method based on deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) coding, using the Word document as carrier. The plain message becomes a cipher sequence after being encoded to a DNA sequence and encrypted by the addition operation. The cipher sequence is attached to a random DNA primer sequence and circularly shifted for finite times, then hide the whole sequence into a Word document through substituting each character’s color. The plaintext can be extracted according to the keys, and the key space is large enough to resist brute force attacks. Experimental results show the feasibility of the scheme. 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.