DNA-MAPPED OPTICAL CRYPTOGRAPHY FOR ROBUST AND EFFICIENT IOT SECURITY

DNA-based optical cryptography for Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices offer a path to secure low-power telemetry with minimal per-packet computation. Existing solutions rely on heavy symmetric ciphers that burden constrained microcontrollers (MCUs) or on bio-inspired encoders that lack scalable optical integration and rigorous real-time traces. This paper proposes DO-OPT (DNA-based Optical Cryptography), a hybrid framework that combined thermodynamically constrained DNA-code mappings, an optical phase-noise derived TRNG (true-random number generator), and a lightweight, post-quantum-capable permutation to enable authenticated, low-latency transmission for IoT telemetry. DO-OPT performed hardware-friendly DNA LUT (lookup table) mappings on the MCU, derived high-entropy keys from an optical TRNG passed through a KDF (key derivation function), and exploited photonic parallelization in an SLM-style optical encoder to reduce wall-clock per-packet processing. The method preserved high ciphertext entropy and increased Key Unpredictability Index (KUI) while lowering energy-per-byte. DO-OPT was evaluated on Gotham Dataset 2025 (78 heterogeneous IoT devices, 1.2M packets) and on a 1,000-node emulated deployment. Metrics included latency, energy-per-byte, KUI, NIST STS (Statistical Test Suite) outcomes, and robustness to ciphertext-only and replay attacks. DO-OPT reduced median per-packet latency by 37.5% and energy-per-byte by 29.2% relative to AES-128, increased entropy per byte from 7.10 to 7.98 bits versus the best prior DNA-inspired scheme, and passed full NIST STS validation. These results indicate DO-OPT provides a practical, energy-efficient security layer suitable for real-time IoT telemetry using DNA–optical hybrids.