Distributions attaining secret key at a rate of the conditional mutual information

© International Association for Cryptologic Research 2015. In this paper we consider the problem of extracting secret key from an eavesdropped source pXY Z at a rate given by the conditional mutual information. We investigate this question under three different scenarios: (i) Alice (X) and Bob (Y) are unable to communicate but share common randomness with the eavesdropper Eve (Z), (ii) Alice and Bob are allowed one-way public communication, and (iii) Alice and Bob are allowed two-way public communication. Distributions having a key rate of the conditional mutual information are precisely those in which a “helping” Eve offers Alice and Bob no greater advantage for obtaining secret key than a fully adversarial one. For each of the above scenarios, strong necessary conditions are derived on the structure of distributions attaining a secret key rate of I(X: Y |Z). In obtaining our results, we completely solve the problem of secret key distillation under scenario (i) and identify H(S|Z) to be the optimal key rate using shared randomness, where S is the Gàcs-Körner Common Information. We thus provide an operational interpretation of the conditional Gàcs- Körner Common Information. Additionally, we introduce simple example distributions in which the rate I(X: Y |Z) is achievable if and only if two-way communication is allowed

Unique Information and Secret Key Decompositions

The unique information ($UI$) is an information measure that quantifies a deviation from the Blackwell order. We have recently shown that this quantity is an upper bound on the one-way secret key rate. In this paper, we prove a triangle inequality for the $UI$, which implies that the $UI$ is never greater than one of the best known upper bounds on the two-way secret key rate. We conjecture that the $UI$ lower bounds the two-way rate and discuss implications of the conjecture.Comment: 7 page

Exponential decreasing rate of leaked information in universal random privacy amplification

We derive a new upper bound for Eve's information in secret key generation from a common random number without communication. This bound improves on Bennett et al(1995)'s bound based on the R\'enyi entropy of order 2 because the bound obtained here uses the R\'enyi entropy of order $1+s$ for $s \in [0,1]$. This bound is applied to a wire-tap channel. Then, we derive an exponential upper bound for Eve's information. Our exponent is compared with Hayashi(2006)'s exponent. For the additive case, the bound obtained here is better. The result is applied to secret key agreement by public discussion.Comment: The organization is a little changed. This version is the same as the published versio

Round Complexity in the Local Transformations of Quantum and Classical States

A natural operational paradigm for distributed quantum and classical information processing involves local operations coordinated by multiple rounds of public communication. In this paper we consider the minimum number of communication rounds needed to perform the locality-constrained task of entanglement transformation and the analogous classical task of secrecy manipulation. Specifically we address whether bipartite mixed entanglement can always be converted into pure entanglement or whether unsecure classical correlations can always be transformed into secret shared randomness using local operations and a bounded number of communication exchanges. Our main contribution in this paper is an explicit construction of quantum and classical state transformations which, for any given $r$, can be achieved using $r$ rounds of classical communication exchanges but no fewer. Our results reveal that highly complex communication protocols are indeed necessary to fully harness the information-theoretic resources contained in general quantum and classical states. The major technical contribution of this manuscript lies in proving lower bounds for the required number of communication exchanges using the notion of common information and various lemmas built upon it. We propose a classical analog to the Schmidt rank of a bipartite quantum state which we call the secrecy rank, and we show that it is a monotone under stochastic local classical operations.Comment: Submitted to QIP 2017. Proof strategies have been streamlined and differ from the submitted versio

Wiretap and Gelfand-Pinsker Channels Analogy and its Applications

An analogy framework between wiretap channels (WTCs) and state-dependent point-to-point channels with non-causal encoder channel state information (referred to as Gelfand-Pinker channels (GPCs)) is proposed. A good sequence of stealth-wiretap codes is shown to induce a good sequence of codes for a corresponding GPC. Consequently, the framework enables exploiting existing results for GPCs to produce converse proofs for their wiretap analogs. The analogy readily extends to multiuser broadcasting scenarios, encompassing broadcast channels (BCs) with deterministic components, degradation ordering between users, and BCs with cooperative receivers. Given a wiretap BC (WTBC) with two receivers and one eavesdropper, an analogous Gelfand-Pinsker BC (GPBC) is constructed by converting the eavesdropper's observation sequence into a state sequence with an appropriate product distribution (induced by the stealth-wiretap code for the WTBC), and non-causally revealing the states to the encoder. The transition matrix of the state-dependent GPBC is extracted from WTBC's transition law, with the eavesdropper's output playing the role of the channel state. Past capacity results for the semi-deterministic (SD) GPBC and the physically-degraded (PD) GPBC with an informed receiver are leveraged to furnish analogy-based converse proofs for the analogous WTBC setups. This characterizes the secrecy-capacity regions of the SD-WTBC and the PD-WTBC, in which the stronger receiver also observes the eavesdropper's channel output. These derivations exemplify how the wiretap-GP analogy enables translating results on one problem into advances in the study of the other