IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

Generalized privacy amplification

C. H. Bennett, Gilles Brassard A, Claude Crépeau, Ueli M. Maurer

Published Jan 1, 1995• 1,427 citations

Abstract

This paper, provides a general treatment of privacy amplification by public discussion, a concept introduced by Bennett, Brassard, and Robert for a special scenario. Privacy amplification is a process that allows two parties to distil a secret key from a common random variable about which an eavesdropper has partial information. The two parties generally know nothing about the eavesdropper's information except that it satisfies a certain constraint. The results have applications to unconditionally secure secret-key agreement protocols and quantum cryptography, and they yield results on wiretap and broadcast channels for a considerably strengthened definition of secrecy capacity.

DOI: 10.1109/18.476316

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