Converses for Secret Key Agreement and Secure Computing

We consider information theoretic secret key agreement and secure function computation by multiple parties observing correlated data, with access to an interactive public communication channel. Our main result is an upper bound on the secret key length, which is derived using a reduction of binary hypothesis testing to multiparty secret key agreement. Building on this basic result, we derive new converses for multiparty secret key agreement. Furthermore, we derive converse results for the oblivious transfer problem and the bit commitment problem by relating them to secret key agreement. Finally, we derive a necessary condition for the feasibility of secure computing by trusted parties that seek to compute a function of their collective data, using interactive public communication that by itself does not give away the value of the function. In many cases, we strengthen and improve upon previously known converse bounds. Our results are single-shot and do not assume that the observations are independent and identically distributed. For the case when the observations are indeed independent and identically distributed, we derive strong versions of previously known converses.