A Secret Common Information Duality for Tripartite Noisy Correlations

Abstract: We explore the duality between the simulation and extraction of secret correlations in light of a similar well-known operational duality between the two notions of common information due to Wyner, and G\'acs and K\"orner. For the inverse problem of simulating a tripartite noisy correlation from noiseless secret key and unlimited public communication, we show that Winter's (2005) result for the key cost in terms of a conditional version of Wyner's common information can be simply reexpressed in terms of the existence of a bipartite protocol monotone. For the forward problem of key distillation from noisy correlations, we construct simple distributions for which the conditional G\'acs and K\"orner common information achieves a tight bound on the secret key rate. We conjecture that this holds in general for non-communicative key agreement models. We also comment on the interconvertibility of secret correlations under local operations and public communication.