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arXiv:cs/0605115 · IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

Key Distillation and the Secret-Bit Fraction

Nick S. Jones, Lluís Masanes

Published Jan 29, 2008• 5 citations
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Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1109/tit.2007.913264

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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 and solve the problem of distilling a secret key from quantum states representing correlation between two parties (Alice and Bob) and an eavesdropper (Eve) via one–way public discussion: we prove a coding theorem to achieve the ‘wire–tapper’ bound, the difference of the mutual information Alice–Bob and that of Alice–Eve, for so–called classical–quantum–quantum–correlations, via one–way public communication. This result yields information–theoretic formulae for the distillable secret key, giving ‘ultimate’ key rate bounds if Eve is assumed to possess a purification of Alice and Bob's joint state. Specializing our protocol somewhat and making it coherent leads us to a protocol of entanglement distillation via one–way LOCC (local operations and classical communication) which is asymptotically optimal: in fact we prove the so–called ‘hashing inequality’, which says that the coherent information (i.e. the negative conditional von Neumann entropy) is an achievable Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen rate. This result is known to imply a whole set of distillation and capacity formulae, which we briefly review.
The inverse of Maurer's secret key distillation problem from (many independent realisations of) a triple of random variables X, Y, Z by two players (Alice and Bob) against an eavesdropper (Eve) is considered: the formation of the joint distribution (up to local degrading of Z) from secret key and public communication. We determine the asymptotically minimal amount of secret key for this task, and indeed the full trade-off of secret (between Alice and Bob) vs. public (shared between Alice, Bob and Eve) correlation for this problem. Our result generalises a theorem of Wyner on the "common information of a pair of random variables", which is recovered as the special case of Z being independent of XY. We investigate the secret key required as a function of the probability distribution and compare to an analogous notion based on prior shared entanglement
We consider the task of distilling local purity from a noisy quantum state ρABC, wherein we provide a protocol for three parties, Alice, Bob and Charlie, to distill local purity (at a rate P) from many independent copies of a given quantum state ρABC. The three parties have access to their respective subsystems of ρABC, and are only allowed to use local unitary operations. In addition, Alice and Bob can communicate with Charlie using a one-way multiple-access dephasing channel of link rates R1and R2, respectively. The objective of the protocol is to minimize the usage of the dephasing channel (in terms of rates R1and R2) while maximizing the asymptotic purity that can be jointly distilled from ρABC. To achieve this, we employ ideas from distributed measurement compression protocols, and in turn, characterize a set of sufficient conditions on (P, R1,R2) in terms of quantum information theoretic quantities such that P amount of purity can be distilled using rates R1and R2.
We consider a physical layer-based secret-key-agreement (SKA) scenario where Alice and Bob aim at extracting a common bit sequence, which should remain secret to Eve, by quantizing a random number obtained from measurements of their communication channel. We propose an asymmetric advantage distillation protocol where i) Alice quantizes her measurement and sends partial information on it over an authenticated public side channel, and ii) Bob (and Eve) quantizes his measurement by exploiting the partial information. The partial information on the position of the measurement in the quantization interval allows Bob to obtain a quantized value closer to that of Alice. Such strategies are shown to increase the lower bound of the secret key rate.
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 consider the extraction of shared secret key from correlations that are generated by either a classical or quantum source. In the classical setting, two honest parties (Alice and Bob) use public discussion and local randomness to distill secret key from some distribution pXYZp_{XYZ}pXYZ​ that is shared with an unwanted eavesdropper (Eve). In the quantum settings, the correlations pXYZp_{XYZ}pXYZ​ are delivered to the parties as either an \textit{incoherent} mixture of orthogonal quantum states or as \textit{coherent} superposition of such states; in both cases, Alice and Bob use public discussion and local quantum operations to distill secret key. 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. In this paper we first demonstrate that the classical key rate is equivalent to the quantum key rate when the correlations are generated incoherently in the quantum setting. For coherent sources, we next show that the rates are incomparable, and in fact, their difference can be arbitrarily large in either direction. However, we identify a large class of non-trivial distributions pXYZp_{XYZ}pXYZ​ that possess the following properties: (i) Eve's advantage is always greater in the quantum source than in its classical counterpart, and (ii) for the quantum entanglement shared between Alice and Bob in the coherent source, the so-called entanglement cost/squashed entanglement/relative entropy of entanglement can all be computed. With property (ii), we thus present a rare instance in which the various entropic entanglement measures of a quantum state can be explicitly calculated.