In this Letter we study the problem of secrecy reversibility. This asks when two honest parties can distill secret bits from some tripartite distribution p(XYZ) and transform secret bits back into p(XYZ) at equal rates using local operation and public communication. This is the classical analog to the well-studied problem of reversibly concentrating and diluting entanglement in a quantum state. We identify the structure of distributions possessing reversible secrecy when one of the honest parties holds a binary distribution, and it is possible that all reversible distributions have this form. These distributions are more general than what is obtained by simply constructing a classical analog to the family of quantum states known to have reversible entanglement. An indispensable tool used in our analysis is a conditional form of the Gács-Körner common information.
In this Letter we study the problem of secrecy reversibility. This asks when two honest parties can distill secret bits from some tripartite distribution p(XYZ) and transform secret bits back into p(XYZ) at equal rates using local operation and public communication. This is the classical analog to the well-studied problem of reversibly concentrating and diluting entanglement in a quantum state. We identify the structure of distributions possessing reversible secrecy when one of the honest parties holds a binary distribution, and it is possible that all reversible distributions have this form. These distributions are more general than what is obtained by simply constructing a classical analog to the family of quantum states known to have reversible entanglement. An indispensable tool used in our analysis is a conditional form of the Gács-Körner common information.
We show that quantum entanglement has a very close classical analog, namely, secret classical correlations. The fundamental analogy stems from the behavior of quantum entanglement under local operations and classical communication and the behavior of secret correlations under local operations and public communication. A large number of derived analogies follow. In particular, teleportation is analogous to the one time pad, the concept of ``pure state'' exists in the classical domain, entanglement concentration and dilution are essentially classical secrecy protocols, and single-copy-entanglement manipulations have such a close classical analog that the majorization results are reproduced in the classical setting. This analogy allows one to import questions from the quantum domain into the classical one, and vice versa, helping to get a better understanding of both. Also, by identifying classical aspects of quantum entanglement, it allows one to identify those aspects of entanglement that are uniquely quantum mechanical.
In this paper, we consider two extensions of the Gács-Körner common information to three variables, theconditional common information(cCI) and thecoarse-grained conditional common information(ccCI). Both quantities are shown to be useful technical tools in the study of classical and quantum resource transformations. In particular, the ccCI is shown to have an operational interpretation as the optimal rate of secret key extraction from an eavesdropped classical sourcepXYZwhen Alice (X) and Bob (Y) are unable to communicate but share common randomness with the eavesdropper Eve (Z). Moving to the quantum setting, we consider two different ways of generating a tripartite quantum state from classical correlationspXYZ: (1) coherent encodings Σxyz√(pxyz)|xyz> and (2) incoherent encodings Σxyzpxyz|xyz>xyz|. We study how well can Alice and Bob extract secret key from these quantum sources using quantum operations compared with the extraction of key from the underlying classical sourcespXYZusing classical operations. While the power of quantum mechanics increases Alice and Bob's ability to generate shared randomness, it also equips Eve with a greater arsenal of eavesdropping attacks. Therefore, it is not obvious who gains the greatest advantage for distilling secret key when replacing a classical source with a quantum one. We first demonstrate that the classical key rate ofpXYZis equivalent to the quantum key rate for an incoherent quantum encoding of the distribution. For coherent encodings, we next show that the classical and quantum rates are generally incomparable, and in fact, their difference can be arbitrarily large in either direction. Finally, we introduce a “zoo” of entangled tripartite states all characterized by the conditional common information of their encoded probability distributions. Remarkably, for these states almost all entanglement measures, such as Alice and Bob's entanglement cost, squashed entanglement, and relative entropy of entanglement, can be sharply bounded or even exactly expressed in terms of the conditional common information. In the latter case, we thus present a rare instance in which the various entropic entanglement measures of a quantum state can be explicitly calculated.
We demonstrate the existence of Gaussian multipartite bound information which is a classical analog of Gaussian multipartite bound entanglement. We construct a tripartite Gaussian distribution from which no secret key can be distilled, but which cannot be created by local operations and public communication. Further, we show that the presence of bound information is conditional on the presence of a part of the adversary's information creatable only by private communication. Existence of this part of the adversary's information is found to be a more generic feature of classical analogs of quantum phenomena obtained by mapping of nonclassically correlated separable quantum states.
We consider distillation of secret bits from partially secret noisy correlations PABE, shared between two honest parties and an eavesdropper. The most studied distillation scenario consists of joint operations on a large number of copies of the distribution (PABE)N, assisted with public communication. Here we consider distillation with only one copy of the distribution, and instead of rates, the ¿quality¿ of the distilled secret bits is optimized, where the ¿quality¿ is quantified by the secret-bit fraction of the result. The secret-bit fraction of a binary distribution is the proportion which constitutes a secret bit between Alice and Bob. With local operations and public communication the maximal extractable secret-bit fraction from a distribution PABEis found, and is denoted by ¿[PABE]. This quantity is shown to be nonincreasing under local operations and public communication, and nondecreasing under eavesdropper's local operations: ¿ is a secrecy monotone. It is shown that if ¿ [PABE] > 1/2 then PABEis distillable, thus providing a sufficient condition for distillability. A simple expression for ¿[PABE] is found when the eavesdropper is decoupled, and when the honest parties' information is binary and the local operations are reversible. Intriguingly, for general distributions the (optimal) operation requires local degradation of the data.
We study the problem of secret key distillation from bipartite states in the scenario where Alice and Bob can perform measurements only at the single-copy level and classically process the obtained outcomes. Even with these limitations, secret bits can be asymptotically distilled by the honest parties from any two-qubit entangled state, under any individual attack. Our results point out a complete equivalence between two-qubit entanglement and secure key distribution: a key can be established through a one-qubit channel if and only if it allows one to distribute entanglement. These results can be generalized to a higher dimension for all those states that are one-copy distillable.
There exist bipartite quantum states that cost entanglement to create, yet from which no singlet can be distilled. This extreme irreversibility is known as bound entanglement. A quarter-century ago, Gisin and Wolf asked whether classical information theory admits the same phenomenon. Are there correlations, shared by two parties and an eavesdropper, that cost secret bits to create, yet from which none can be distilled? This question is part of a broader program exploring the relation between quantum and classical information theory. We answer it in the affirmative, providing a simple example, a distribution of two bits and a trit. Bound entanglement thus has a classical counterpart, bound information. An even more direct correspondence was originally conjectured, namely that measuring purifications of bound-entangled states yields distributions with bound information. The very states that motivated the conjecture, however, yield no bound information when measured in the standard basis, whereas suitable measurements of purifications of separable states do. The analogy between bound entanglement and bound information thus lies in the accounting of resources, not in a correspondence between individual quantum states and the classical probability distributions induced by measuring them.