A practical protocol for advantage distillation and information reconciliation

Information-theoretic secret key agreement generally consists of three phases, namely, advantage distillation information reconciliation and privacy amplification. Advantage distillation is needed in the case when two legitimate users, Alice and Bob, start in a situation which is inferior to that of the adversary Eve. The aim for them is to gain advantage over Eve in terms of mutual information between each other. Information reconciliation enables Alice and Bob to arrive at a common string by error correction techniques. Finally they distill a highly secret string from the common string in the privacy amplification phase. For the scenario where Alice and Bob as well as Eve have access to the output of a binary symmetric source by means of (three) binary symmetric channels, there are several advantage distillation and information reconciliation protocols proposed. In this paper, we present a general protocol to implement both advantage distillation and information reconciliation. Simulation results are compared with known protocols. A connection between our protocol and the known protocols is given.