Genomic encryption of digital data stored in synthetic DNA

Abstract

Today, we can read human genomes and store digital data robustly in synthetic DNA. Here we report a strategy to intertwine these two technologies to enable the secure storage of valuable information in synthetic DNA, protected with personalized keys. We show that genetic short tandem repeats (STRs) contain sufficient entropy to generate strong encryption keys, and that only one technology, DNA sequencing, is required to simultaneously read key and data. Using this approach, we experimentally generated 80 bit strong keys from human DNA, and used such a key to encrypt 17kB of digital information stored in synthetic DNA. Finally, the decrypted information was recovered perfectly from a single massively parallel sequencing run.