Bio-molecular cryptography for protecting nano-network transmissions in healthcare applications

Nano-technologies and communications at the nanoscale emerged as new approaches for data collection in many application domains, such as bio-medicine, healthcare, industry, agro-food, and military/defense. They usually entail a huge amount of continuous and real-time information to be processed from nano-devices, thus paving the way for the spreading of an innovation paradigm, represented by the Internet of Nano-Things (IoNT). The reliability of the envisioned IoNT applications still represents an open issue, due to the complexity of protecting the transmitted data at the nano-scale. In this context, this work proposes to adopt bio-molecular cryptography to secure data exchanges among the nano-devices in a nano-network, which integrates both molecular diffusion and electromagneticbased communication protocols. Bio-molecular cryptography is essentially based on the properties of DNA and proteins. Starting from such premises, a cryptographic algorithm is developed and its performance is evaluated on a reference IoNT scenario in the healthcare domain, along with the study of the behavior of different routing algorithms.