Diffie-Hellman (D-H)
Diffie-Hellman (D-H) is a public-key cryptography protocol. It allows two parties to establish a shared secret key used by encryption algorithms (DES or MD5, for example) over an insecure communications channel. D-H is used within IKE (described later in this article) to establish session keys. 768-bit and 1024-bit D-H groups are supported in the Cisco routers and PIX Firewall. The 1024-bit group is more secure.