LDPC-based secret key agreement over the Gaussian wiretap channel

Abstract

This paper investigates a practical secret key agreement protocol over the Gaussian wire-tap channel. The protocol is based on an efficient information reconciliation method which allows two parties having access to correlated continuous random variables to agree on a common bit string. We describe an explicit reconciliation method based on LDPC codes optimized with EXIT charts and density evolution. When used in conjunction with existing privacy amplification techniques our method allows secret key agreement over the Gaussian wire-tap channel close to the secrecy capacity