Effects of Quantization on the Multiple-Round Secret-Key Capacity

Abstract: We consider the strong secret key (SK) agreement problem for the satellite communication setting, where a satellite chooses a common binary phase shift keying modulated input for three statistically independent additive white Gaussian noise measurement channels whose outputs are observed by two legitimate transceivers (Alice and Bob) and an eavesdropper (Eve), respectively. Legitimate transceivers have access to an authenticated, noiseless, two-way, and public communication link, so they can exchange multiple rounds of public messages to agree on a SK hidden from Eve. Without loss of essential generality, the noise variances for Alice's and Bob's measurement channels are both fixed to a value $Q>1$, whereas the noise over Eve's measurement channel has a unit variance, so $Q$ represents a channel quality ratio. We show that when both legitimate transceivers apply a one-bit uniform quantizer to their noisy observations before SK agreement, the SK capacity decreases at least quadratically in $Q$.