The use of Diffie-Hellman exchange ensures perfect forward secrecy—a property of a key establishment protocol that guarantees that compromise of a session key or long-term private key after a given session does not cause the compromise of any earlier session.

The authentication relies on a pre-shared secret (e.g., password), which is protected (i.e., remains unrevealed) to an eavesdropper preventing an off-line dictionary attack.

[1] The protocol can be used in a wide variety of applications including those with pre-shared secrets based on possibly weak passwords.

X.1035 was approved on 13 February 2007 by ITU-T Study Group 17.

[2] G.hn, an ITU-T standard that specifies high-speed (up to 1 Gbit/s) local area networking over existing home wires (power lines, phone lines and coaxial cables), uses X.1035 for authentication and key exchange.