MQV (Menezes-Qu-Vanstone)

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 Menezes, Qu and Vanstone in 1995. It was modified by Law and Solinas in 1998. There are one-, two- and three-pass variants. MQV is incorporated in the public-key standard IEEE P1363. MQV is covered by patents assigned to Certicom [1]. MQV has some (alleged) weaknesses that were (allegedly) fixed by HMQV in 2005 [2], but see [3] for an alternative viewpoint. ECMQV is also specified by the National Security Agency as part of the 'Suite B' set of cryptographic standards for securing US Federal government communications up to the TOP SECRET classification