Data hiding using dictionary based substitution method in DNA sequences

There has been always a need to search new mediums as well as techniques to send the data secretly. Recent research establishes Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) as an interesting medium for Steganography. DNA have various artificial components that can be used for hiding and sending secret information from any source to destination. Genetic information obtained from DNA is encoded as a sequence of nucleotides i.e. Guanine, Adenine, Thymine and Cytosine denoted by the letters G, A, T and C respectively. A huge amount of information can be hidden using these four nucleotides. This paper proposes an improved algorithm namely Dictionary Based Substitution Method (DBSM) in order to increase the capacity and security of existing data hiding method i.e. Substitution Method (SM). In order to achieve this the proposal uses a dictionary to hide the message using four nucleotides elements. The paper contain different experiments to examine the performance and make comparisons on the basis of capacity, bits-per-nucleotide (bpn) and cracking probability.