  We study the equivalence between a realistic quantum key distribution
protocol using coherent states and homodyne detection and a formal entanglement
purification protocol. Maximally-entangled qubit pairs that one can extract in
the formal protocol correspond to secret key bits in the realistic protocol.
More specifically, we define a qubit encoding scheme that allows the formal
protocol to produce more than one entangled qubit pair per coherent state, or
equivalently for the realistic protocol, more than one secret key bit. The
entanglement parameters are estimated using quantum tomography. We analyze the
properties of the encoding scheme and investigate its application to the
important case of the attenuation channel.
