Genuine Multipartite Entanglement is Not Necessary for Standard Device-Independent Conference Key Agreement

Conference key agreement aims to establish shared, private randomness among many separated parties in a network. Device-independent conference key agreement (DICKA) is a variant in which the source and the measurement devices used by each party need not be trusted. So far, DICKA protocols largely fall into two categories: those that rely on violating a joint Bell inequality using genuinely multipartite entangled states and those that concatenate many bipartite protocols. The question of whether a hybrid protocol exists, where a multipartite Bell inequality can be violated using only bipartite entanglement, was asked by Grasselli et al. [Quantum 7, 980 (2023)]. We answer this question affirmatively, by constructing an asymptotically secure DICKA protocol achieving the same rate as the concatenation of bipartite device-independent quantum key distribution, yet relying on a single joint Bell violation. Our results prompt further discussion on the benefits of multipartite entanglement for DICKA over its bipartite alternative, and we give an overview of different arguments for near-term devices.