Characterization of distillability of entanglement in terms of positive maps

A necessary and sufficient condition for one-distillability is formulated in terms of decomposable positive maps. As an application we provide insight into why all states violating the reduction criterion map are distillable and demonstrate how to construct such maps in a systematic way. We establish a connection between a number of existing results, which leads to an elementary proof for the characterization of distillability in terms of two-positive maps.