Secret-key generation with correlated sources and noisy channels

Abstract

A joint-source-channel setup for secret-key generation between remote terminals is considered. The sender communicates to the receiver over a discrete memoryless wiretap channel and the sender and receiver observe a pair of correlated discrete memoryless sources. Lower and upper bounds for the secret-key rate are presented and shown to coincide for the case when the underlying channel is a reversely degraded parallel channel. Our setup also provides an operational significance to the rate-equivocation tradeoff of the wiretap channel, and this is illustrated in detail for the Gaussian case.