Strong Secrecy in Pairwise Key Agreement over a Generalized Multiple Access Channel

Abstract: This paper considers the problem of pairwise key agreement without public communication between three users connected through a generalized multiple access channel (MAC). While two users control the channel inputs, all three users observe noisy outputs from the channel and each pair of users wishes to agree on a secret key hidden from the remaining user. We first develop a "pre-generated" key-agreement scheme based on secrecy codes for the generalized MAC, in which the channel is only used to distribute pre-generated secret keys. We then extend this scheme to include an additional layer of rate-limited secret-key generation by treating the observed channel outputs as induced sources. We characterize inner and outer bounds on the strong secret-key capacity region for both schemes. For a special case of the "pre-generated" scheme, we obtain an exact characterization. We also illustrate with some binary examples that exploiting the generalized nature of the generalized MAC may lead to significantly larger key-agreement rates.