Method for decoupling error correction from privacy amplification

Entanglement purification provides a unifying framework for proving the security of quantum key distribution schemes. Nonetheless, up till now, a local commutability constraint in the CSS code construction means that the error correction and privacy amplification procedures of BB84 are not fully decoupled. Here, I provide a method to decouple the two processes completely. The method requires Alice and Bob to share some initial secret string and use it to encrypt the bit-flip error syndrome using one-time-pad encryption. As an application, I prove the unconditional security of the interactive Cascade protocol, proposed by Brassard and Salvail for error correction, modified by one-time-pad encryption of the error syndrome, and followed by the random matrix protocol for privacy amplification. This is an efficient protocol in terms of both computational power and key generation rate.