Generalized Privacy Amplification

Charles H. Bennett, Gilles Brassard, Claude Crépeau, and Ueli Maurer

IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 41, no. 6, pp. 1915–1923, Nov 1995, Preliminary version: [BBCM94].

This paper provides a general treatment of privacy amplification by public discussion, a concept introduced by Bennett, Brassard and Robert for a special scenario. Privacy amplification is a process that allows two parties to distill a secret key from a common random variable about which an eavesdropper has partial information. The two parties generally know nothing about the eavesdropper's information except that it satisfies a certain constraint. The results have applications to unconditionally-secure secret-key agreement protocols and quantum cryptography, and they yield results on wire-tap and broadcast channels for a considerably strengthened definition of secrecy capacity.

Keywords: Cryptography, Secret-key agreement, Unconditional security, Privacy amplification, Wire-tap channel, Secrecy capacity, Renyi entropy, Universal hashing, Quantum cryptography.

BibTeX Citation

@article{BBCM95,
    author       = {Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard and Claude Crépeau and Ueli Maurer},
    title        = {Generalized Privacy Amplification},
    journal      = {IEEE Transactions on Information Theory},
    pages        = {1915--1923},
    number       = {6},
    volume       = {41},
    year         = {1995},
    month        = {11},
    note         = {Preliminary version: \cite{BBCM94}},
}