The art of distilling [secret key generation]

Aultmore and Balvenie want to agree on a common secret key. They have at their disposal a noisy channel and an error free public channel. The situation is complicated by an adversary, Ellen, who eavesdrops the noisy channel and the public channel. Fortunately for Aultmore and Balvenie, the eavesdropping channel is noisy as well. This will enable them to generate a secret key. In the literature, this is done in three phases; the advantage distillation phase, the information reconciliation phase, and the privacy amplification phase. We show that the first two phases are based on the same concept and that presently known techniques used in both phases are basically special cases of a more general technique.