ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: INFORMATION THEORETIC SECRET KEY GENERATION: STRUCTURED CODES AND TREE PACKING

This dissertation deals with a multiterminal source model for secret key gen-eration by multiple network terminals with prior and privileged access to a set of correlated signals complemented by public discussion among themselves. Emphasis is placed on a characterization of secret key capacity, i.e., the largest rate of an achievable secret key, and on algorithms for key construction. Various information theoretic security requirements of increasing stringency: weak, strong and perfect se-crecy, as well as dierent types of sources: nite-valued and continuous, are studied. Speci cally, three dierent models are investigated. First, we consider strong secrecy generation for a discrete multiterminal source model. We discover a connection between secret key capacity and a new source coding concept of \minimum information rate for signal dissemination, " that is of independent interest in multiterminal data compression. Our main contribution is to show for this discrete model that structured linear codes suce to generate a strong secret key of the best rate. Second, strong secrecy generation is considered for models with continuous ob