  Existing quantum cryptographic schemes are not, as they stand, operable in
the presence of noise on the quantum communication channel. Although they
become operable if they are supplemented by classical privacy-amplification
techniques, the resulting schemes are difficult to analyse and have not been
proved secure. We introduce the concept of quantum privacy amplification and a
cryptographic scheme incorporating it which is provably secure over a noisy
channel. The scheme uses an `entanglement purification' procedure which,
because it requires only a few quantum Controlled-Not and single-qubit
operations, could be implemented using technology that is currently being
developed. The scheme allows an arbitrarily small bound to be placed on the
information that any eavesdropper may extract from the encrypted message.
