The effect of side-information on smooth entropy

Roger Balian

Yumin Wang

This paper investigates the effect of side-information,obtained by the opponent through an initial reconciliation step,on the size of the secret-key that can be distilled safely by subsequent privacy amplification in uncoditionally-secure secret-key agreement protocol based on smooth entropy,and obtains the size of the secret-key with some probability.

Yuta Sakai, Vincent Y. F. Tan

This study considers the unconditional smooth Rényi entropy proposed by Renner and Wolf [ASIACRYPT, 2005], the smooth conditional Rényi entropy proposed by Kuzuoka [IEEE Trans. Inf. Th., 66(3), 1674–1690, 2020], and a novel quantity which we term theconditional smooth-⋆entropy.The latter two quantities can be specialized to the first in the absence of side-information. We explore the operational roles of these smooth Rényi entropies by establishing one-shot coding theorems for several information-theoretic problems, including Campbell’s source coding problem, the Arıkan–Massey guessing problem, and the Bunte–Lapidoth task encoding problem. We consider these problems in cases where the errors are non-vanishing and for each problem, we consider two error formalisms: the average and maximum error criteria, where the averaging and maximization are taken with respect to the side-information. Using the one-shot coding theorems, we conclude that Kuzuoka’s smooth conditional Rényi entropy and the conditional smooth-⋆ entropy are the solutions to the problems involving the average and maximum error criteria, respectively. Furthermore, we examine asymptotic expansions of these entropies when the underlying source with its side-information is stationary and memoryless. Applying our asymptotic expansions to the one-shot coding theorems, we derive various fundamental limits for these problems. We show that, under non-degenerate settings, the first-order fundamental limits differ under the average and maximum error criteria. This is in contrast to a different but related setting considered by the present authors [IEEE Trans. Inf. Th., 66(12), 7565–7587, 2020], for variable-length conditional source coding allowing errors, in which the first-order terms are identical but the second-order terms are different under these error criteria.

Alfred Wehrl

Marco Tomamichel

This thesis consolidates, improves and extends the smooth entropy framework for non-asymptotic information theory and cryptography. We investigate the conditional min- and max-entropy for quantum states, generalizations of classical Rényi entropies. We introduce the purified distance, a novel metric for unnormalized quantum states and use it to define smooth entropies as optimizations of the min- and max-entropies over a ball of close states. We explore various properties of these entropies, including data-processing inequalities, chain rules and their classical limits. The most important property is an entropic formulation of the asymptotic equipartition property, which implies that the smooth entropies converge to the von Neumann entropy in the limit of many independent copies. The smooth entropies also satisfy duality and entropic uncertainty relations that provide limits on the power of two different observers to predict the outcome of a measurement on a quantum system. Finally, we discuss three example applications of the smooth entropy framework. We show a strong converse statement for source coding with quantum side information, characterize randomness extraction against quantum side information and prove information theoretic security of quantum key distribution using an intuitive argument based on the entropic uncertainty relation.