[Cryptography] Secret key agreement by public discussion from common information

[mok-kong shen]

There is a paper: U. M. Maurer, Secret key agreement by public 
discussion from common information, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, 39(3) 
733-742 of 1993, with an IMHO fairly impressive title but having 
apparently for some unknown reasons been hithertofore ignored in the 
common textbooks on modern cryptography. The material there is way above 
my humble knowledge, hence my request: Could some experts kindly give a 
sketch of the main idea of the paper such that one could get at least a 
certain rough comprehension of it? Are there good open-source 
implementations of that key agreement scheme?

M. K. Shen