Device-independent conference key agreement from two-body correlators with balanced Dicke states

Abstract

Device-independent conference key agreement (DI-CKA) enables $N > 2$ distant parties to establish a common secret key without detailed characterization of the source or measurement devices. Many existing protocols rely on full-body Bell correlators, whose measurement can be demanding for a large number of parties. Here, we show that two-body correlators alone suffice for DI-CKA using balanced Dicke states for every even $N \geq 4$. We construct two-body Bell inequalities and derive a tight analytical lower bound on the conditional von Neumann entropy by comparing their Bell operators with those of asymmetric Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequalities. In the ideal setting, certified key rates can approach $1-h[(N-2)/(4(N-1))]$, where $h$ is the binary entropy function. This rate remains bounded away from zero as $N \rightarrow \infty$, tending to $1-h(1/4) \approx 0.189$ bits per key-generation round. We show that the honest implementation of our protocol is invariant under collective phase noise. Moreover, a complementary full-body Bell construction certifies positive conference-key rates from correlations arbitrarily close to the local set.