Secret Key Agreement via Secure Omniscience

In this paper, we explore the connection between secret key agreement and secure omniscience within the setting of the multiterminal source model with an eavesdropper having side information. While the secret key agreement problem considers the generation of a maximum-rate secret key through public discussion, the secure omniscience problem is concerned with communication protocols for omniscience that minimize the rate of information leakage to the eavesdropper. The starting point of our work is a lower bound on the minimum leakage rate for omniscience, R_L , in terms of the wiretap secret key capacity, C_W. Our interest is in identifying broad classes of sources for which this lower bound is met with equality, in which case we say that there is a duality between secure omniscience and secret key agreement. We show that this duality holds in the case of certain finite linear source (FLS) models, such as two-terminal FLS models and pairwise independent network models on trees with a linear eavesdropper. Duality also holds for any FLS model in which C_W is achieved by a perfect linear secret key agreement scheme. We conjecture that the duality in fact holds unconditionally for any FLS model. On the negative side, we give an example of a (non-FLS) source model for which duality does not hold if we limit ourselves to communication-for-omniscience protocols with at most two (interactive) communications. We also address the secure function computation problem and explore the connection between the minimum leakage rate for computing a function and the wiretap secret key capacity. © 2023 IEEE.