Generalized privacy amplification

This paper provides a general treatment of privacy amplification by public discussion, a concept introduced by Bennett, Brassard, and Robert for a special scenario, Privacy amplification is a process that allows two parties to distill a secret key from a common random variable about which an eavesdropper has partial information, The two parties generally know nothing about the eavesdropper's information except that it satisfies a certain constraint, The results have applications to unconditionally secure secret-key agreement protocols and quantum cryptography, and they yield results on wiretap and broadcast channels for a considerably strengthened definition of secrecy capacity.