Secret Key Generation with Limited Interaction

TL;DR

This paper analyzes secret key generation with limited interaction, providing new characterizations of the key-communication rate region, and shows that in some regimes, interaction does not improve efficiency over one-way communication.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-letter characterization of the key-communication rate region and a simpler concave envelope characterization for unlimited rounds, resolving a conjecture for binary sources.

Findings

Key bits per interaction bit (KBIB) characterized by a new symmetric strong data processing constant.

In low communication regimes, interaction does not outperform one-way schemes.

Resolved a conjecture on the minimum interaction rate for maximum key rate for binary sources.

Abstract

A basic two-terminal secret key generation model is considered, where the interactive communication rate between the terminals may be limited, and in particular may not be enough to achieve the maximum key rate. We first prove a multi-letter characterization of the key-communication rate region (where the number of auxiliary random variables depend on the number of rounds of the communication), and then provide an equivalent but simpler characterization in terms of concave envelopes in the case of unlimited number of rounds. Two extreme cases are given special attention. First, in the regime of very low communication rates, the \emph{key bits per interaction bit} (KBIB) is expressed with a new "symmetric strong data processing constant", which has a concave envelope characterization analogous to that of the conventional strong data processing constant. The symmetric strong data processing constant can be upper bounded by the supremum of the maximal correlation coefficient over a set of distributions, which allows us to determine the KBIB for binary symmetric sources, and conclude, in particular, that the interactive scheme is not more efficient than the one-way scheme at least in the low communication-rate regime. Second, a new characterization of the \emph{minimum interaction rate needed for achieving the maximum key rate} (MIMK) is given, and we resolve a conjecture by Tyagi regarding the MIMK for (possibly nonsymmetric) binary sources. We also propose a new conjecture for binary symmetric sources that the interactive scheme is not more efficient than the one-way scheme at any communication rate.