An information reconciliation protocol for secret-key agreement with small leakage

Abstract

We report on a highly efficient information reconciliation protocol for the binary symmetric channel (BSC) with feedback, proposed to be used in the context of secret-key agreement. This is a variant of the so-called Cascade protocol. Simulations determine efficiencies, defined by the ratio of actual transmitted information to the necessary amount of information, of approximately 1.025 for a frame length of 2 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">14</sup> bits and a frame error rate of typically 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">−4</sup> . The proposed algorithm works for any BSC parameter between 0 and 0.5.