Variable-Length Secret Key Agreement via Random Stopping Time

Abstract: We consider a key agreement setting where two parties observe correlated random sources, and want to agree on a secret key via public discussions. In order to allow the key length to adapt to the realizations of the random sources, we allow the key to be of variable length, subject to a novel variable-length version of the uniformity constraint based on random stopping time. We propose simple, computationally efficient key agreement schemes under the new constraint. The proposed scheme can be considered as the key agreement analogue of variable-length source coding via Huffman coding, and the Knuth-Yao random number generator.