Is there a meaningful quantum counterpart to public communication? We argue that it is the symmetric-side channel. This connection is partially motivated by recent work, where it was found that if a sender would like to communicate a secret message to a receiver through an insecure quantum channel using a shared quantum state as a key, then the insecure quantum channel is only ever used to simulate a symmetric-side channel. Here, we further show, in complete analogy to the role of public classical communication, that assistance by a symmetric-side channel makes equal the distillable entanglement, the recently introduced mutual independence, and a generalization of the latter, which quantifies the extent to which one of the parties can perform quantum privacy amplification. Symmetric-side channels, and the closely related erasure channel, have been recently harnessed to provide examples of superactivation of the quantum channel capacity. Our findings give new insight into this nonadditivity and its relation to quantum privacy. In particular, we show that single-copy superactivation protocols with the erasure channel, which encompasses all examples of nonadditivity of the quantum capacity found to date, can be understood as a conversion of mutual independence into distillable entanglement.

We study the problem ofk-pair communication (or multiple unicast problem) of quantum information in networks of quantum channels. We consider the asymptotic rates of high fidelity quantum communication between specific sender-receiver pairs. Four scenarios of classical communication assistance (none, forward, backward, and two-way) are considered. (I) We obtain outer and inner bounds of the achievable rate regions in the most general directed networks. (II) For two particular networks (including the butterfly network), routing is proved optimal, and the free assisting classical communication can at best be used to modify the directions of quantum channels in the network. Consequently, the achievable rate regions are given by counting edge avoiding paths, and precise achievable rate regions in all four assisting scenarios can be obtained. (III) Optimality of routing can also be proved in classes of networks. The first class consists of directed unassisted networks in which (1) the receivers are information sinks, (2) the maximum distance from senders to receivers is small, and (3) a certain type of 4-cycles are absent, but without further constraints (such as on the number of communicating and intermediate parties). The second class consists of arbitrary backward-assisted networks with two sender-receiver pairs. (IV) Beyond thek-pair communication problem, observations are made on quantum multicasting and a static version of network communication related to the entanglement of assistance.

In this paper, we develop a formalism for distilling a classical key from a quantum state in a systematic way, expanding on our previous work on a secure key from bound entanglement (Horodecki, 2005). More detailed proofs, discussion, and examples are provided of the main results. Namely, we demonstrate that all quantum cryptographic protocols can be recast in a way which looks like entanglement theory, with the only change being that instead of distilling Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) pairs, the parties distill private states. The form of these general private states are given, and we show that there are a number of useful ways of expressing them. Some of the private states can be approximated by certain states, which are bound entangled. Thus, distillable entanglement is not a requirement for a private key. We find that such bound entangled states are useful for a cryptographic primitive we call a controlled private quantum channel (PQC). We also find a general class of states, which have negative partial transpose (are NPT), but which appear to be bound entangled. The relative entropy distance is shown to be an upper bound on the rate of a key. This allows us to compute theexactvalue of a distillable key for a certain class of private states.

New measures of multipartite entanglement are constructed based on two definitions of multipartite information and different methods of optimizing over extensions of the states. One is a generalization of the squashed entanglement where one takes the mutual information of parties conditioned on the state's extension and takes the infimum over such extensions. Additivity of the multipartite squashed entanglement is proved for both versions of the multipartite information which turn out to be related. The second one is based on taking classical extensions. This scheme is generalized, which enables to construct measures of entanglement based on the mixed convex roof of a quantity, which in contrast to the standard convex roof method involves optimization over all decompositions of a density matrix rather than just the decompositions into pure states. As one of the possible applications of these results we prove that any multipartite monotone is an upper bound on the amount of multipartite distillable key. The findings are finally related to analogous results in classical key agreement.

In this paper, we prove unconditional security for a quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol based on distilling pbits (twisted ebits) from an arbitrary untrusted state that is claimed to contain distillable key. Our main result is that we can verify security using only public communication-via parameter estimation of the given untrusted state. The technique applies even to bound-entangled states, thus extending QKD to the regime where the available quantum channel has zero quantum capacity. We also show how to convert our purification-based QKD schemes to prepare/measure schemes.