Separation of Reliability and Secrecy in Rate-Limited Secret-Key Generation

TL;DR

This paper investigates secret-key generation with rate-limited public communication, proposing a sequential strategy that separates reliability and secrecy, and analyzing its effectiveness and limitations in different source models.

Contribution

It introduces an alternative achievability scheme for rate-limited secret-key generation and analyzes the independence of reliability and secrecy in sequential strategies.

Findings

Sequential strategies achieve known bounds for rate-limited WSK capacity in degraded sources.

Reliability and secrecy can be treated independently in certain scenarios.

Sequential strategies have limitations compared to rate-unlimited communication.

Abstract

For a discrete or a continuous source model, we study the problem of secret-key generation with one round of rate-limited public communication between two legitimate users. Although we do not provide new bounds on the wiretap secret-key (WSK) capacity for the discrete source model, we use an alternative achievability scheme that may be useful for practical applications. As a side result, we conveniently extend known bounds to the case of a continuous source model. Specifically, we consider a sequential key-generation strategy, that implements a rate-limited reconciliation step to handle reliability, followed by a privacy amplification step performed with extractors to handle secrecy. We prove that such a sequential strategy achieves the best known bounds for the rate-limited WSK capacity (under the assumption of degraded sources in the case of two-way communication). However, we show that, unlike the case of rate-unlimited public communication, achieving the reconciliation capacity in a sequential strategy does not necessarily lead to achieving the best known bounds for the WSK capacity. Consequently, reliability and secrecy can be treated successively but not independently, thereby exhibiting a limitation of sequential strategies for rate-limited public communication. Nevertheless, we provide scenarios for which reliability and secrecy can be treated successively and independently, such as the two-way rate-limited SK capacity, the one-way rate-limited WSK capacity for degraded binary symmetric sources, and the one-way rate-limited WSK capacity for Gaussian degraded sources.