The focus of this paper is on the public communication required for generating a maximal-rate secret key (SK) within the multiterminal source model of Csiszar and Narayan. Building on the prior work of Tyagi for the two-terminal scenario, we derive a lower bound on the communication complexity, @math , defined to be the minimum rate of public communication needed to generate a maximal-rate SK. It is well known that the minimum rate of communication for omniscience, denoted by @math , is an upper bound on @math . For the class of pairwise independent network (PIN) models defined on uniform hypergraphs, we show that a certain Type @math condition, which is verifiable in polynomial time, guarantees that our lower bound on @math meets the @math upper bound. Thus, the PIN models satisfying our condition are @math -maximal, indicating that the upper bound @math holds with equality. This allows us to explicitly evaluate @math for such PIN models. We also give several examples of PIN models that satisfy our Type @math condition. Finally, we prove that for an arbitrary multiterminal source model, a stricter version of our Type @math condition implies that communication from all terminals (omnivocality) is needed for establishing an SK of maximum rate. For three-terminal source models, the converse is also true: omnivocality is needed for generating a maximal-rate SK only if the strict Type @math condition is satisfied. However, for the source models with four or more terminals, counterexamples exist showing that the converse does not hold in general.
A new model of multi-party secret key agreement is proposed, in which one terminal called the communicator can transmit public messages to other terminals before all terminals agree on a secret key. A single-letter characterization of the achievable region is derived in the stationary memoryless case. The new model generalizes some other (old and new) models of key agreement. In particular, key generation with an omniscient helper is the special case where the communicator knows all sources, for which we derive a zero-rate one-shot converse for the secret key per bit of communication.