Addressing Information Using Data Hiding for DNA-based Storage Systems

DNA-based storage systems have been recently studied very well because the systems have ultra-high density and ultra-long endurance compared with traditional data storage media. DNA-based storage systems use a DNA strand which stores a subblock of an input data. Additionally, its infra-file location (an address or index of the subblock) is also stored to restore the input data from a set of DNA strands. In fact, the cost of the indices becomes large as input data size goes to large. Moreover, the cost of constructing DNA strands, called synthesizing, is expensive.In this paper, for reducing the cost of indices in DNA strands, we propose addressing information using data hiding (steganography) for DNA-based storage systems. The proposed algorithms embed an index to a subblock of an input data in a DNA strand, and the index block is removed from a DNA strand. We also evaluate the number of bits which can be embed to a subblock for variants of conventional DNA-based storage systems. The scheme of the proposed algorithm can be applied to embed not only addressing information but also some valuable information such as a summary and the copyright of the file to DNA strands.