An efficient quantum secure direct communication scheme with authentication

In this paper an efficient quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) scheme with authentication is presented, which is based on quantum entanglement and polarized single photons. The present protocol uses Einstein--Podolsky--Rosen (EPR) pairs and polarized single photons in batches. A particle of the EPR pairs is retained in the sender's station, and the other is transmitted forth and back between the sender and the receiver, similar to the `ping--pong' QSDC protocol. According to the shared information beforehand, these two kinds of quantum states are mixed and then transmitted via a quantum channel. The EPR pairs are used to transmit secret messages and the polarized single photons used for authentication and eavesdropping check. Consequently, because of the dual contributions of the polarized single photons, no classical information is needed. The intrinsic efficiency and total efficiency are both 1 in this scheme as almost all of the instances are useful and each EPR pair can be used to carry two bits of information.     

Quantum Secure Direct Communication with Authentication Expansion UsingSingle Photons

In this paper we propose two quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) protocols with authentication. The authentication key expansion method is introduced to improve the life of the keys with security. In the first scheme, the third party, called Trent is introduced to authenticate the users that participate in the communication. He sends the polarized photons in blocks toauthenticate communication parties Alice and Bob using the authentication keys. In the communication process, polarized single photons are used to serve as the carriers, which transmit the secret messages directly. The second QSDC process with authentication between two parties is also discussed.     

Three-party Quantum Secure Direct Communication with Single Photons in both Polarization and Spatial-mode Degrees of Freedom

We present an efficient three-party quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) protocol with single photos in both polarization and spatial-mode degrees of freedom. The three legal parties’ messages can be encoded on the polarization and the spatial-mode states of single photons independently with desired unitary operations. A party can obtain the other two parties’ messages simultaneously through a quantum channel. Because no extra public information is transmitted in the classical channels, the drawback of information leakage or classical correlation does not exist in the proposed scheme. Moreover, the comprehensive security analysis shows that the presented QSDC network protocol can defend the outsider eavesdropper’s several sorts of attacks. Compared with the single photons with only one degree of freedom, our protocol based on the single photons in two degrees of freedom has higher capacity. Since the preparation and the measurement of single photon quantum states in both the polarization and the spatial-mode degrees of freedom are available with current quantum techniques, the proposed protocol is practical.     

Eavesdropping on Quantum Secure Direct Communication with W State in Noisy Channel

Security of the quantum secure direct communication protocol （i.e., the C-S QSDC protocol） recently proposed by Cao and Song [Chin. Phys. Lett. 23 （2006） 290] is analyzed in the case of considerable quantum channel noise. The eavesdropping scheme is presented, which reveals that the C-S QSDC protocol is not secure if the quantum bit error rate （QBER） caused by quantum channel noise is higher than 4.17%. Our eavesdropping scheme induces about 4.17% QBER for those check qubits. However, such QBER can be hidden in the counterpart induced by the noisy quantum channel if the eavesdropper Eve replaces the original noisy channel by an ideal one. Furthermore, if the QBER induced by quantum channel noise is lower than 4.17%, then in the eavesdropping scheme Eve still can eavesdrop part of the secret messages by safely attacking a fraction of the transmitted qubits. Finally, an improvement on the C-S QSDC protocol is put forward.     

Quantum secure direct communication and deterministic secure quantum communication

In this review article, we review the recent development of quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) and deterministic secure quantum communication (DSQC) which both are used to transmit secret message, including the criteria for QSDC, some interesting QSDC protocols, the DSQC protocols and QSDC network, etc. The difference between these two branches of quantum communication is that DSQC requires the two parties exchange at least one bit of classical information for reading out the message in each qubit, and QSDC does not. They are attractive because they are deterministic, in particular, the QSDC protocol is fully quantum mechanical. With sophisticated quantum technology in the future, the QSDC may become more and more popular. For ensuring the safety of QSDC with single photons and quantum information sharing of single qubit in a noisy channel, a quantum privacy amplification protocol has been proposed. It involves very simple CHC operations and reduces the information leakage to a negligible small level. Moreover, with the one-party quantum error correction, a relation has been established between classical linear codes and quantum one-party codes, hence it is convenient to transfer many good classical error correction codes to the quantum world. The one-party quantum error correction codes are especially designed for quantum dense coding and related QSDC protocols based on dense coding.      

Quantum Secure Direct Communication by Using Three-Dimensional Hyperentanglement

We propose two schemes for realizing quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) by using a set of ordered two-photon three-dimensional hyperentangled states entangled in two degrees of freedom (DOFs) as quantum information channels. In the first scheme, the photons from Bob to Alice are transmitted only once. After insuring the security of the quantum channels, Bob encodes the secret message on his photons. Then Alice performs single-photon two-DOF Bell bases measurements on her photons. This scheme has better security than former QSDC protocols. In the second scheme, Bob transmits photons to Alice twice. After insuring the security of the quantum channels, Bob encodes the secret message on his photons. Then Alice performs two-photon Bell bases measurements on each DOF. The scheme has more information capacity than former QSDC protocols.     

量子直接通信

量子直接通信是量子通信中的一个重要分支, 它是一种不需要事先建立密钥而直接传输机密信息的新型通信模式. 本综述将介绍量子直接通信的基本原理, 回顾量子直接通信的发展历程, 从最早的高效量子直接通信协议、两步量子直接通信模型、量子一次一密直接通信模型等, 到抗噪声的量子直接通信模型以及基于单光子多自由度量子态及超纠缠态的量子直接通信模型, 最后介绍量子直接通信的研究现状并展望其发展未来.     

Fault tolerant quantum secure direct communication with quantum encryption against collective noise

We present two novel quantum secure direct communication(QSDC) protocols over different collective-noise channels.Different from the previous QSDC schemes over collective-noise channels,which are all source-encrypting protocols,our two protocols are based on channel-encryption.In both schemes,two authorized users first share a sequence of EPR pairs as their reusable quantum key.Then they use their quantum key to encrypt and decrypt the secret message carried by the decoherence-free states over the collective-noise channel.In theory,the intrinsic efficiencies of both protocols are high since there is no need to consume any entangled states including both the quantum key and the information carriers except the ones used for eavesdropping checks.For checking eavesdropping,the two parties only need to perform two-particle measurements on the decoy states during each round.Finally,we make a security analysis of our two protocols and demonstrate that they are secure.     

Quantum secure direct communication with quantum encryption based on pure entangled states

This paper presents a scheme for quantum secure direct communication with quantum encryption. The two authorized users use repeatedly a sequence of the pure entangled pairs (quantum key) shared for encrypting and decrypting the secret message carried by the travelling photons directly. For checking eavesdropping, the two parties perform the single-photon measurements on some decoy particles before each round. This scheme has the advantage that the pure entangled quantum signal source is feasible at present and any eavesdropper cannot steal the message.     

Quantum secure dialogue by using single photons

By combining the idea of quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) and BB84 quantum key distribution (QKD), we propose a secure quantum dialogue protocol via single photons. Comparing with the previous bidirectional quantum secure communication scheme [24] in which the EPR pairs are used, our protocol is not only feasible in practice but also can overcome the drawback “information leakage” or “classical correlation”. Our scheme possesses the characters of security and high efficiency.     

Novel Quantum Virtual Private Network Scheme for PON via Quantum Secure Direct Communication

Two quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) protocols with quantum identification (QI) based on passive optical network (PON) architecture are proposed. One QSDC protocol can be implemented between two different optical network units just with simple configurations of PON by optical line terminal when they are in the same virtual private network after optical line terminal performing QI to the optical network units in the given PON architecture. The other QSDC protocol is also implemented between any two legitimated users in the virtual private network but with considerable reduction of workload of the optical line terminal. The security analysis shows that the proposed QSDC schemes with quantum identification are unconditionally secure and allow the legitimate users to exchange their secret information efficiently and to realize a quantum virtual private network in the PON networks ultimately.     

A two-step quantum secure direct communication protocol with hyperentanglement

We propose a two-step quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) protocol with hyperentanglement in both the spatial-mode and the polarization degrees of freedom of photon pairs which can in principle be produced with a beta barium borate crystal. The secret message can be encoded on the photon pairs with unitary operations in these two degrees of freedom independently. This QSDC protocol has a higher capacity than the original two-step QSDC protocol as each photon pair can carry 4 bits of information. Compared with the QSDC protocol based on hyperdense coding, this QSDC protocol has the immunity to Trojan horse attack strategies with the process for determining the number of the photons in each quantum signal as it is a one-way quantum communication protocol.     

Secure quantum dialogue based on single-photon

In this paper a quantum dialogue scheme is proposed by using N batches of single photons. The same secret message is encoded on each batch of single photons by the sender with two different unitary operations, and then the N batches of single photons are sent to the receiver. After eavesdropping check, the message is encoded on the one remaining batch by the receiver. It is shown that the intercept-and-resend attack and coupling auxiliary modes attack can be resisted more efficiently, because the photons are sent only once in our quantum dialogue scheme.     

Robust Quantum Secure Communication with Spatial Quantum States of Single Photons

The polarization quantum states of photon systems are fragile to the channel noise. However, recent experiments showed that the spatial quantum states of photon systems are robust. Recently, Ren et al. proposed a robust quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) protocol with spatial entanglement (Ren et al., Eur. Phys. J. D 67:30, 2013). Here we proposed a robust QSDC protocol and a robust three-party quantum secret sharing protocol with the four nonorthogonal spatial quantum states of a sequence of single photons, respectively. Both these two quantum secure communication protocols have the advantage of having a robust character and not increasing the difficulty of their implementations in experiment, compared with almost all the existing quantum secure communication protocols which are based on the polarization quantum states of photon systems. Moreover, they are more feasible than the QSDC protocol by Ren et al. as they do not require Bell-state measurements.     

High-Capacity Quantum Secure Direct Communication with Single Photons in Both Polarization and Spatial-Mode Degrees of Freedom

We present a high-capacity quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) protocol with single photons in both the polarization and the spatial-mode degrees of freedom. With a single photon traveling forth and back from the receiver to the sender, it can carry 2 bits of information as the sender can encode his message on both the polarization states and the spatial-mode states of single photons independently. Moreover, our QSDC protocol is feasible as the preparation and the measurement of a single-photon quantum state in both the polarization and the spatial-mode degrees of freedom is not difficult with current technology.     

A New Quantum Secure Direct Communication Protocol Using Decoherence-Free Subspace

A new quantum secure direct communication （QSDC） protocol is proposed by using decoherence free subspace （DFS） to avoid insecurity of the present QSDC protocols in a quantum noise channel. This protocol makes it easily for Bob and Alice to find eavesdropping in channel because the collective dephasing noise disappears in DFS. The probability of successful attack by Eve in this protocol is smaller than in BB84 protocol. Thus this protocol realizes secure QSDC and is feasible with present-day technology.     

An efficient and secure multiparty quantum secret sharing scheme based on single photons

A scheme of multiparty quantum secret sharing of classical messages (QSSCM) is proposed based on single photons and local unitary operations. In this scheme, eavesdropping checks are performed only twice, and one photon can generate one bit of classical secret message except those chosen for eavesdropping check; in addition, only the sender and one of the agents are required to store photons. Thus, this scheme is more practical and efficient.     

Efficient Quantum Secure Direct Communication Using the Orbital Angular Momentum of Single Photons

Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) is to transmit information directly through quantum channels without generating secret keys. The efficiencies of QSDC rely on the capacity of qubits. Exploiting orbital angular momentum of single photons, we proposed a high-capacity one-time pad QSDC protocol. The information is encoded on the Hermite-Gauss mode and transmitted directly on the Laguerre-Gauss mode of the photon pluses. The proposed system provides a high coding space, and the proposed protocol is robust against collective-dephasing channel noise.     

High-capacity quantum secure direct communication with two-photon six-qubit hyperentangled states

This study proposes the first high-capacity quantum secure direct communication(QSDC) with two-photon six-qubit hyperentangled Bell states in two longitudinal momentum and polarization degrees of freedom(DOFs) of photon pairs, which can be generated using two 0.5 mm-thick type-I β barium borate crystal slabs aligned one behind the other and an eight-hole screen. The secret message can be independently encoded on the photon pairs with 64 unitary operations in all three DOFs. This protocol has a higher capacity than previous QSDC protocols because each photon pair can carry 6 bits of information, not just 2 or 4 bits.Our QSDC protocol decreases the influence of decoherence from environment noise by exploiting the decoy photons to check the security of the transmission of the first photon sequence. Compared with two-way QSDC protocols, our QSDC protocol is immune to an attack by an eavesdropper using Trojan horse attack strategies because it is a one-way quantum communication.The QSDC protocol has good applications in the future quantum communication because of all these features.     

一种基于诱骗态的广域量子安全直接通信网络方案

提出了一种基于诱骗态的广域量子安全直接通信网络方案.在每一个局域网中设置一个服务器负责量子态的产生和测量,从而提高了通信距离;将诱骗态的思想引入量子安全直接通信,采用不同的强度发送光脉冲,能够克服光子数目分割攻击,从而提高通信的安全性;根据信道参量估计了不同通信距离的通过率,为信道编码提供了依据.对所提方案进行了安全性分析,结果表明此方案能够实现远距离量子安全直接通信.