Efficient Diffie-Hellmann two-party key agreement protocols based on elliptic curves

Key agreement protocols are of fundamental importance for ensuring the confidentiality of communications between two (or more) parties over an insecure network. In this paper we review existing two-party protocols whose security rests upon the intractability of Diffie-Hellmann and Discrete Logarithm problems over elliptic curve groups. In addition, we propose a new two-party mutual authenticated key agreement protocol and collectively evaluate the security and performance of all the schemes considered. Elliptic curve techniques are used to minimise the computational workload on resource-constrained devices and to afford security levels with possibly fewer bits.