Some cryptographic schemes based on the bilinear pairings were proposed recently. In this paper, we apply the pairings on elliptic curve and Elliptic Curve Cryptography to the key agreement of dynamic peer group. Each member performs authentication and contributes a secret data to negotiate a group common key by means of a binary key tree. The proposed protocol does not need a dedicated central server to perform the key agreement, and the overhead is distributed among the group members. To provide a secure dynamic group communication, the key renewing mechanism has to be included. While the member joins/leaves, the group session key will be renewed to provide the backward/forward privacy, respectively. The key renewing is much efficient because it is only confined to the keys of the key-path. The proposed protocol is flexible while the change of membership is frequent.

Advances in smart card technology encourages smart card use in more sensitive applications, such as storing important information and securing application. Smart cards are however vulnerable to side channel attacks. Power consumption and electromagnetic radiation of the smart card can leak information about the secret data protected by the smart card. Our paper describes two possible hardware countermeasures that protect against side channel information leakage. We show that power analysis can be prevented by adopting photo-coupling techniques. This method involves the use of LED with photovoltaic cells and photo-couplers on the power, reset, I/O and clock lines of the smart card. This method reduces the risk of internal data bus leakage on the external data lines. Moreover, we also discuss the effectiveness of reducing electromagnetic radiation by using embedded metal plates.

Since an FFT-based speech encryption system retains a considerable residual intelligibility, such as talk spurts and the original intonation in the encrypted speech, this makes it easy for eavesdroppers to deduce the information contents from the encrypted speech. In this letter, we propose a new technique based on the combination of an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) scheme and an appropriate QAM mapping method to remove the residual intelligibility from the encrypted speech by permuting several frequency components. In addition, the proposed OFDM-based speech encryption system needs only two FFT operations instead of the four required by the FFT-based speech encryption system. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of this proposed technique.