Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral (ECDHE)

Elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) is an anonymous key agreement protocol that allows two parties, each having an elliptic curve public-private key pair, to establish a shared secret over an insecure channel. This shared secret may be directly used as a key, or to derive another key which can then be used to encrypt subsequent communications using a symmetric key cipher. It is a variant of the Diffie-Hellman protocol using elliptic curve cryptography.

Alternative protocols include the Fully Hashed MQV (FHMQV), an authenticated protocol for key agreement based on the Diffie-Hellman scheme. SSL supports forward secrecy using two algorithms, the standard Diffie-Hellman (DHE) and the adapted version for use with Elliptic Curve cryptography. ECDHE and DHE are the cornerstones of conventional SSL secure web connection protocols. DHE is significantly slower. ECDHE is supported by all major modern browsers.

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman".