Multi-round encryption for COVID-19 data using the DNA key

The need for a reliable and fast encryption algorithm to encrypt medical data for patients is an extremely important topic to be considered especially during pandemic times such as the pandemic COVID-19. This pandemic forced governments and healthcare institutions to monitor COVID-19 patients. All the patient's data or records are also shared among healthcare researchers to be used to help them find vaccines or cures for this pandemic. Therefore, protecting such data (images, text) or records face an ever-increasing number of risks. In this paper, a novel multi-round encryption algorithm based on deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is proposed. The significance of the proposed algorithm comes from using a different random key to perform simple and fast encryption operations on multiple rounds to achieve a high level of confusion and diffusion effects in encrypted data. Experiments were conducted using a set of datasets of various types such as Excel sheets, images, and database tables. The experiments were conducted to test the performance and security level of the proposed encryption algorithm against well-known algorithms such as data encryption standard (DES) and advanced encryption standard (AES). The experiments show an outstanding performance regarding the encryption time, key size, information entropy, and the avalanche effects.