Quantum Wiretap Channel Coding Assisted by Noisy Correlation

We consider the private classical capacity of a quantum wiretap channel, where the users (sender Alice, receiver Bob, and eavesdropper Eve) have access to the resource of a shared quantum state, additionally to their channel inputs and outputs. An extreme case is maximal entanglement or a secret key between Alice and Bob, both of which would allow for one-time padding the message. But here both the wiretap channel and the shared state are general. In the other extreme case that the state is trivial, we recover the wiretap channel and its private capacity [N. Cai, A. Winter and R. W. Yeung, Probl. Inform. Transm. 40(4):318-336, 2004]. We show how to use the given resource state to build a code for secret classical communication. Our main result is a lower bound on the assisted private capacity, which asymptotically meets the multi-letter converse and which encompasses all sorts of previous results as special cases.