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Quantum states that possess negative conditional von Neumann entropy provide quantum advantage in several information-theoretic protocols including superdense coding, state merging, distributed private randomness distillation and one-way entanglement distillation. While entanglement is an important resource, only a subset of entangled states have negative conditional von Neumann entropy. Despite this utility, a proper resource theory for conditional von Neumann entropy has not been developed, unlike that of entanglement. We pave the way for such a resource theory by characterizing the class of free states (density matrices having non-negative conditional von Neumann entropy) as convex and compact. This allows us to prove the existence of a Hermitian operator (a witness) for the detection of states having negative conditional entropy for bipartite systems in arbitrary dimensions. We construct a family of such witnesses and prove that the expectation value of any of them in a state is an upper bound to the conditional entropy of the state. We pose the problem of obtaining a tight upper bound to the set of conditional entropies of states in which an operator gives the same expectation value as a convex optimization problem. We solve it numerically for a two qubit case and find that this enhances the usefulness of our witnesses. We also find that for a particular witness, the estimated tight upper bound matches the value of conditional entropy for Werner states. We explicate the utility of our work in the detection of useful states in the above-mentioned protocols.