A French-Japanese team presented a world first in Tokyo, encryption of a message using DNA-based technology. A document was securely exchanged using two identical keys created in Paris and Tokyo from synthetic DNA.
During a visit by Emmanuel Macron, French president, to the LIMMS laboratory affiliated with CNRS, a document was securely exchanged using two identical keys generated in Paris and Tokyo from synthetic DNA, one for encryption and the other for decryption.
As data storage is expected to be a challenge in the coming decades, the director of the laboratory, Nicolas Clément, stated, “the perfect hard drive already exists, it’s DNA.” He explained, “with a few grams of DNA, we can store colossal amounts of data.”
Emmanuel Macron commented, “It’s very impressive,” mentioning “a huge potential for innovation and development.” DNA cryptography could be an alternative to quantum approaches for securing sensitive information exchanges.
Researchers from EPSCI Paris – PSL, University of Limoges, and IMT Atlantique in France, along with colleagues from the University of Tokyo, used DNA properties to create encryption keys. These keys encode messages to make them incomprehensible to anyone without the decryption key.
A powerful encryption?
Military orders, diplomatic communications, financial data – the confidentiality of digital messages relies on these codes, which weaken with the development of powerful computers capable of breaking them. To be inviolable, an encryption key must be as long as the message being protected, perfectly random, and used only once.
The French-Japanese team managed to create such keys from synthetic DNA – which has no biological function and contains no genetic information.
DNA being extremely dense and stable, the sender and recipient can share a vast quantity of these keys before any communication. They can store them for decades or even centuries.
During communication, powerful sequencing machines at the sender and recipient read the DNA molecules and convert them into binary code (0 or 1 bits) to encode, send, and decode messages up to several hundred megabytes.
Scientists developed techniques to ensure any interception attempt is detected by the sender and recipient before use.
One key advantage of this technology is the ability to exchange encryption keys over long distances, unlike with quantum cryptography, which relies on the very fragile properties of particles.
