  The multiterminal secret key agreement problem by public discussion is
formulated with an additional source compression step where, prior to the
public discussion phase, users independently compress their private sources to
filter out strongly correlated components for generating a common secret key.
The objective is to maximize the achievable key rate as a function of the joint
entropy of the compressed sources. Since the maximum achievable key rate
captures the total amount of information mutual to the compressed sources, an
optimal compression scheme essentially maximizes the multivariate mutual
information per bit of randomness of the private sources, and can therefore be
viewed more generally as a dimension reduction technique. Single-letter lower
and upper bounds on the maximum achievable key rate are derived for the general
source model, and an explicit polynomial-time computable formula is obtained
for the pairwise independent network model. In particular, the converse results
and the upper bounds are obtained from those of the related secret key
agreement problem with rate-limited discussion. A precise duality is shown for
the two-user case with one-way discussion, and such duality is extended to
obtain the desired converse results in the multi-user case. In addition to
posing new challenges in information processing and dimension reduction, the
compressed secret key agreement problem helps shed new light on resolving the
difficult problem of secret key agreement with rate-limited discussion, by
offering a more structured achieving scheme and some simpler conjectures to
prove.
