Information-theoretic key agreement is impossible to achieve from scratch and
must be based on some - ultimately physical - premise. In 2005, Barrett, Hardy,
and Kent showed that unconditional security can be obtained in principle based
on the impossibility of faster-than-light signaling; however, their protocol is
inefficient and cannot tolerate any noise. While their key-distribution scheme
uses quantum entanglement, its security only relies on the impossibility of
superluminal signaling, rather than the correctness and completeness of quantum
theory. In particular, the resulting security is device independent. Here we
introduce a new protocol which is efficient in terms of both classical and
quantum communication, and that can tolerate noise in the quantum channel. We
prove that it offers device-independent security under the sole assumption that
certain non-signaling conditions are satisfied. Our main insight is that the
XOR of a number of bits that are partially secret according to the
non-signaling conditions turns out to be highly secret. Note that similar
statements have been well-known in classical contexts. Earlier results had
indicated that amplification of such non-signaling-based privacy is impossible
to achieve if the non-signaling condition only holds between events on Alice's
and Bob's sides. Here, we show that the situation changes completely if such a
separation is given within each of the laboratories.Comment: 32 pages, v2: changed introduction, added reference