MQV

MQV (Menezes–Qu–Vanstone) is an authenticated protocol for key agreement based on the Diffie–Hellman scheme. Like other authenticated Diffie–Hellman schemes, MQV provides protection against an active attacker. The protocol can be modified to work in an arbitrary finite group, and, in particular, elliptic curve groups, where it is known as elliptic curve MQV (ECMQV).

MQV was initially proposed by Alfred Menezes, Minghua Qu and Scott Vanstone in 1995. It was later modified in joint work with Laurie Law and Jerry Solinas. There are one-, two- and three-pass variants.

MQV is incorporated in the public-key standard IEEE P1363 and NIST's SP800-56A standard.

Some variants of MQV are claimed in patents assigned to Certicom.

ECMQV has been dropped from the National Security Agency's Suite B set of cryptographic standards.