Abstract
This paper is concerned with information-theoretically secure secret key agreement in the general scenario where three parties, Alice, Bob, and Eve, know random variables X, Y, and Z, respectively, with joint distribution P xyz , for instance resulting from receiving a sequence of random bits broadcast by a satellite. We consider the problem of determining for a given distribution P xyz whether Alice and Bob can in principle, by communicating over an insecure channel accessible to Eve, generate a secret key about which Eve's information is arbitrarily small. When X, Y, and Z are random variables that result from a binary random variable being sent through three arbitrary independent channels, it is shown that secret key agreement is possible if and only if I(X;Y¦Z) >0, i.e., under the sole condition that X and Y have some (arbitrarily weak) statistical dependence when given Z.
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© 1996 Springer-Verlag
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Maurer, U., Wolf, S. (1996). Towards characterizing when information-theoretic secret key agreement is possible. In: Kim, K., Matsumoto, T. (eds) Advances in Cryptology — ASIACRYPT '96. ASIACRYPT 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1163. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0034847
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0034847
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