We study the classical problem of privacy amplification, where two parties Alice and Bob share a weak secret $X$ of min-entropy $k$, and wish to agree on secret key $R$ of length $m$ over a public communication channel completely controlled by a computationally unbounded attacker Eve.
Despite being extensively studied in the literature, the problem of designing ``optimal'' efficient privacy amplification protocols is still open, because there are several optimization goals. The first of them is (1) minimizing the {\em entropy loss} $L=k-m$ (it is known that the optimal value for $L=O(\lambda)$, where $\eps=2^{-\lambda}$ is the desired security of the protocol). Other important considerations include (2) minimizing the number of communication rounds, (3) maintaining security even after the secret key is used (this is called {\em post-application robustness}), and (4) ensuring that the protocol $P$ does not leak some ``useful information'' about the source $X$ (this is called {\em source privacy}). Additionally, when dealing with a very long source $X$, as happens in the so-called Bounded Retrieval Model (BRM), extracting as long a key as possible is no longer the goal. Instead, the goals are (5) to touch as little of $X$ as possible (for efficiency), and (6) to be able to run the protocol many times on the same $X$, extracting multiple secure keys.
Achieving goals (1)-(4) (or (2)-(6) in BRM) simultaneously has remained open, and, indeed, all known protocols fail to achieve at least two of them.
In this work we improve upon the current state-of-the-art, by designing a variety of new privacy amplification protocols, in several cases achieving {\em optimal parameters for the first time}. Moreover, in most cases we do it by giving relatively {\em general transformations} which convert a given protocol $P$ into a ``better'' protocol $P'$. In particular, as special cases of these transformations (applied to best known prior protocols), we achieve the following privacy amplification protocols for the first time:
\begin{itemize}
\item $4$-round (resp. $2$-round) {\em source-private} protocol with {\em optimal entropy loss} $L=O(\lambda)$, whenever $k = \Omega(\lambda^2)$ (resp. $k > \frac{n}{2}(1-\alpha)$ for some universal constant $\alpha>0$). Best previous constant round source-private protocols achieved $L=\Omega(\lambda^2)$.
\item $3$-round {\em post-application-robust} protocols with {\em optimal entropy loss} $L=O(\lambda)$, whenever $k = \Omega(\lambda^2)$ or $k > \frac{n}{2}(1-\alpha)$ (the latter is also {\em source-private}). Best previous post-application robust protocols achieved $L=\Omega(\lambda^2)$.
\item The first BRM protocol capable of extracting the optimal number $\Theta(k/\lambda)$ of session keys, improving upon the previously best bound $\Theta(k/\lambda^2)$. (Additionally, our BRM protocol is post-application-robust, takes $2$ rounds, and can be made source-private by increasing the number of rounds to $4$.)
\end{itemize}
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