Effective Privacy Amplification for Secure Classical Communications

We study the effectiveness of privacy amplification for classical key-distribution schemes. We find that, unlike quantum key distribution schemes, the high fidelity of the raw key in classical systems allow the users to always sift a secure shorter key, given that they have an upper bound of eavesdropper probability to correctly guess the exchanged key-bits. We establish the number of privacy amplification iterations needed to achieve information leak of 10^-8 in several classical systems and highlight the inherent tradeoff between the number of iterations and the security of the raw key.