Multipartite classical and quantum secrecy monotones

In order to study multipartite quantum cryptography, we introduce quantities which vanish on product probability distributions, and which can only decrease if the parties carry out local operations or public classical communication. These “secrecy monotones” therefore measure how much secret correlation is shared by the parties. In the bipartite case we show that the mutual information is a secrecy monotone. In the multipartite case we describe two different generalizations of the mutual information, both of which are secrecy monotones. The existence of two distinct secrecy monotones allows us to show that in multipartite quantum cryptography the parties must make irreversible choices about which multipartite correlations they want to obtain. Secrecy monotones can be extended to the quantum domain and are then defined on density matrices. We illustrate this generalization by considering tripartite quantum cryptography based on the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state. We show that before carrying out measurements on the state, the parties must make an irreversible decision about what probability distribution they want to obtain.