Information Security and Cryptography Research Group

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}},
}

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