Title: On the Optimality of Secret Key Agreement via Omniscience,
Abstract: For the multiterminal secret key agreement problem under a private source
model, it is known that the maximum key rate, i.e., the secrecy capacity, can
be achieved through communication for omniscience, but the omniscience strategy
can be strictly suboptimal in terms of minimizing the public discussion rate.
While a single-letter characterization is not known for the minimum discussion
rate needed for achieving the secrecy capacity, we derive single-letter lower
and upper bounds that yield some simple conditions for omniscience to be
discussion-rate optimal. These conditions turn out to be enough to deduce the
optimality of omniscience for a large class of sources including the
hypergraphical sources. Through conjectures and examples, we explore other
source models to which our methods do not easily extend.