Data Hiding in DNA for Authentication of Plant Variety Rights

Hiding data in the deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA) can facilitate the authentication and annotation of important plant variety rights. A grant of plant variety rights for a new plant variety gives you the exclusive right to produce for sale and sell propagating material of the variety. Digital watermarking techniques have been proposed for a wide range of applications, including ownership protection, copy control, annotation, and authentication. However, existing data hiding methods for DNA change the functionalities of DNA sequences, which induce morphological changes in biological patterns. This paper proposes a high capacity data hiding scheme for DNA without changing the functionalities of DNA sequences. This scheme adaptively varies the embedding process according to the amount of hidden data. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme gives a significantly improved hiding performance than previous schemes. And the robustness and security issues are also analyzed.