Secure rate-adaptive reconciliation

Abstract

We consider in this paper the problem of information reconciliation in the context of secret key agreement between two legitimate parties, Alice and Bob. Beginning the discussion with the secret key agreement model introduced by Ahlswede and Csiszár, the channel-type model with wiretapper, we study a protocol based on error correcting codes. The protocol can be adapted to changes in the communication channel extending the original source. The efficiency of the reconciliation is only limited by the quality of the code and, while transmitting more information than needed to reconcile Alice's and Bob's sequences, it does not reveal any more information on the original source than an ad-hoc code would have revealed.