Unconditionally Secure Key Agreement and the Intrinsic Conditional Information
Ueli Maurer and Stefan Wolf
This paper is concerned with secret-key agreement by public discussion. Assume that two parties Alice and Bob and an adversary Eve have access to independent realizations of random variables $X$, $Y$, and $Z$, respectively, with joint distribution $P_{XYZ}$. The secret key rate $S(X;Y||Z)$ has been defined as the maximal rate at which Alice and Bob can generate a secret key by communication over an insecure, but authenticated channel such that Eve's information about this key is arbitrarily small. We define a new conditional mutual information measure, the intrinsic conditional mutual information between $X$ and $Y$ when given $Z$, denoted by $I(X;Y \downarrow Z)$, which is an upper bound on $S(X;Y||Z)$. The special scenarios are analyzed where $X$, $Y$, and $Z$ are generated by sending a binary random variable $R$, for example a signal broadcast by a satellite, over independent channels, or two scenarios in which $Z$ is generated by sending $X$ and $Y$ over erasure channels.In the first two scenarios it can be shown that the secret key rate is strictly positive if and only if $I(X;Y \downarrow Z)$ is strictly positive. For the third scenario a new protocol is presented which allows secret-key agreement even when all the previously known protocols fail.
BibTeX Citation
@article{MauWol99a,
author = {Ueli Maurer and Stefan Wolf},
title = {Unconditionally Secure Key Agreement and the Intrinsic Conditional Information},
journal = {IEEE Transactions on Information Theory},
pages = 499--514,
number = 2,
volume = 45,
year = 1999,
month = 3,
}