New bounds on the information-theoretic key agreement of multiple terminals

Abstract

We study the problem of information-theoretically secure secret key agreement under the well-known source model and channel model. In both of these models the parties wish to create a shared secret key that is secure from an eavesdropper with unlimited computational resources. In the channel model, the first party can choose a sequence of inputs to a discrete memoryless channel, which has outputs at the other parties and at the eavesdropper. After each channel use, the parties can engage in arbitrarily many rounds of interactive authenticated communication over a public channel. At the end, each party should be able to generate the key. In the source model, the parties wishing to generate a secret key (as well as the eavesdropper) receive a certain number of independent identically distributed copies of jointly distributed random variables after which the parties are allowed interactive authenticated public communication, at the end of which each party should be able to generate the key. We derive new lower and upper bounds on the secret key rate under the source model and the channel model, and introduce a technique for proving that a given expression bounds the secrecy rate from above in the channel model. Our lower bounds strictly improve what is essentially the best known lower bound in both the source model and the channel model. Our upper bound in the channel model strictly improves the current state of art upper bound. We do not know whether our new upper bound in the source model represents an strict improvement but it includes the current best known bound as a special case.