  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 carry out public classical
communication. These ``secrecy monotones'' therefore measure how much secret
correlations are 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 generalisations 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 generalisation by considering tri-partite
quantum cryptography based on the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) 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.
