Incremental and Decremental Secret Key Agreement

We study the rate of change of the multivariate mutual information among a set of random variables when some common randomness is added to or removed from a subset. This is formulated more precisely as two new multiterminal secret key agreement problems which ask how one can increase the secrecy capacity efficiently by adding common randomness to a small subset of users, and how one can simplify the source model by removing redundant common randomness that does not contribute to the secrecy capacity. The combinatorial structure has been clarified along with some meaningful open problems.