Universally composable privacy amplification against quantum adversaries

Abstract

Privacy amplification is the art of shrinking a partially secret string Z to a highly secret key S. We show that, even if an adversary holds quantum information about the initial string Z, the key S obtained by two-universal hashing is secure, according to a universally composable security definition. Additionally, we give an asymptotically optimal lower bound on the length of the extractable key S in terms of the adversary's (quantum) knowledge about Z. Our result has applications in quantum cryptography. In particular, it implies that many of the known quantum key distribution protocols are universally composable. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.