Multiparty Quantum Key Agreement Protocol with Entanglement Swapping

International Journal of Theoretical Physics - Secure and fair multiparty quantum key agreement protocols demand all participants influence and negotiate the shared secret key with equal right and...     

Multi-party Semi-quantum Key Agreement with Delegating Quantum Computation

A multi-party semi-quantum key agreement (SQKA) protocol based on delegating quantum computation (DQC) model is proposed by taking Bell states as quantum resources. In the proposed protocol, the participants only need the ability of accessing quantum channel and preparing single photons {|0〉, |1〉, |+〉, |?〉}, while the complicated quantum operations, such as the unitary operations and Bell measurement, will be delegated to the remote quantum center. Compared with previous quantum key agreement protocols, this client-server model is more feasible in the early days of the emergence of quantum computers. In order to prevent the attacks from outside eavesdroppers, inner participants and quantum center, two single photon sequences are randomly inserted into Bell states: the first sequence is used to perform the quantum channel detection, while the second is applied to disorder the positions of message qubits, which guarantees the security of the protocol.     

Three-step semiquantum secure direct communication protocol

Quantum secure direct communication is the direct communication of secret messages without need for establishing a shared secret key first. In the existing schemes, quantum secure direct communication is possible only when both parties are quantum. In this paper, we construct a three-step semiquantum secure direct communication (SQSDC) protocol based on single photon sources in which the sender Alice is classical. In a semiquantum protocol, a person is termed classical if he (she) can measure, prepare and send quantum states only with the fixed orthogonal quantum basis {|0〉, |1〉}. The security of the proposed SQSDC protocol is guaranteed by the complete robustness of semiquantum key distribution protocols and the unconditional security of classical one-time pad encryption. Therefore, the proposed SQSDC protocol is also completely robust. Complete robustness indicates that nonzero information acquired by an eavesdropper Eve on the secret message implies the nonzero probability that the legitimate participants can find errors on the bits tested by this protocol. In the proposed protocol, we suggest a method to check Eves disturbing in the doves returning phase such that Alice does not need to announce publicly any position or their coded bits value after the photons transmission is completed. Moreover, the proposed SQSDC protocol can be implemented with the existing techniques. Compared with many quantum secure direct communication protocols, the proposed SQSDC protocol has two merits: firstly the sender only needs classical capabilities; secondly to check Eves disturbing after the transmission of quantum states, no additional classical information is needed.     

A Multi-party Quantum Key Agreement Protocol Based on Shamir’s Secret Sharing

Quantum networks can extend the advantages of quantum key distribution protocols to more than two remote participants. Based on Shamir threshold secret sharing scheme, a new quantum key agreement protocol on a quantum network with any number of participants is proposed. First, each participant and distributor negotiate a sub-secret key using a kind of quantum key distribution protocol, and then each of these participants, as distributor, shares these sub-secret keys with other participants using Shamir threshold secret sharing scheme. Furthermore, each participant combines all these shared sub-secret keys and his own sub-secret key in sequence to form secret key, and sends the hash function values of this secret key to the master distributor to authenticate, finally they obtain the security key. Our scheme is practical and secure, and it can also prevent fraudulent from participants.

     

Quantum Key Agreement Against Collective Decoherence

A robust and efficient quantum key agreement (QKA) protocol is presented with decoherence-free (DF) states and single-particle measurements. Compared with all the previous QKA protocols, which are designed in ideal condition, this protocol can not only guarantee both the security and fairness of the shared key but also be immune to collective decoherence. In addition, our protocol has a high intrinsic efficiency due to the utilization of the delayed measurement technique. Finally, we show that the proposed protocol is secure against the attacks from both outside eavesdroppers and inside dishonest participants.     

Quantum Secure Direct Communication with Two-Photon Four-Qubit Cluster States

In a quantum secure direct communication protocol, two remote parties can transmit the secret message directly without first generating a key to encrypt them. A quantum secure direct communication protocol using two-photon four-qubit cluster states is presented. The presented scheme can achieve a higher efficiency in transmission and source capacity compared with the proposed quantum secure direct communication protocols with cluster states, and the security of the protocol is also discussed.     

Quantum Dialogue with Authentication Based on Bell States

We propose an authenticated quantum dialogue protocol, which is based on a shared private quantum entangled channel. In this protocol, the EPR pairs are randomly prepared in one of the four Bell states for communication. By performing four Pauli operations on the shared EPR pairs to encode their shared authentication key and secret message, two legitimate users can implement mutual identity authentication and quantum dialogue without the help from the third party authenticator. Furthermore, due to the EPR pairs which are used for secure communication are utilized to implement authentication and the whole authentication process is included in the direct secure communication process, it does not require additional particles to realize authentication in this protocol. The updated authentication key provides the counterparts with a new authentication key for the next authentication and direct communication. Compared with other secure communication with authentication protocols, this one is more secure and efficient owing to the combination of authentication and direct communication. Security analysis shows that it is secure against the eavesdropping attack, the impersonation attack and the man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack.     

Efficient Multiparty Quantum Secret Sharing of Secure Direct Communication Based on Bell States and Continuous Variable Operations

By using some ordered Bell states as quantum channel, we propose a protocol for multiparty quantum secret sharing of secure direct communication. The present scheme follows the ideas of dense coding and ping-pong technique. It has a high source capacity as each traveling photon carries two bits of classical secret messages, and has a high intrinsic efficiency because almost all the instances are useful. Since the continuous variable operations instead of the discrete unitary operations used usually are employed to realize the sharing controls, the security of the present protocol is therefore enhanced. Furthermore, due to existing multilevel security checking procedures, the present scheme can prevent against some usual attack strategies.     

Three-Party Semi-Quantum Key Agreement Protocol

International Journal of Theoretical Physics - A semi-quantum key agreement protocol is proposed to allow one quantum participant and two classical ones to negotiate the final shared secret key...     

Network-topology-adaptive quantum conference protocols

As an important application of the quantum network communication,quantum multiparty conference has made multiparty secret communication possible.Previous quantum multiparty conference schemes based on quantum data encryption are insensitive to network topology.However,the topology of the quantum network significantly affects the communication efficiency,e.g.,parallel transmission in a channel with limited bandwidth.We have proposed two distinctive protocols,which work in two basic network topologies with efficiency higher than the existing ones.We first present a protocol which works in the reticulate network using Greeberger-Horne-Zeilinger states and entanglement swapping.Another protocol,based on quantum multicasting with quantum data compression,which can improve the efficiency of the network,works in the star-like network.The security of our protocols is guaranteed by quantum key distribution and one-time-pad encryption.In general,the two protocols can be applied to any quantum network where the topology can be equivalently transformed to one of the two structures we propose in our protocols.     

Three Attacks on the Mediated Semi-Quantum Key Distribution without Invoking Quantum Measurement

Semi-quantum key distribution is a very interesting new branch of quantum key distribution. It can be implemented when one or more participants are restricted to operate quantum states only on the quantum computational basis. Very recently, a mediated semi-quantum key distribution protocol without invoking two participants' quantum measurement has been proposed. The protocol allows two “classical” participants without sophisticated quantum capability to establish a shared secret key under an untrusted third party. It is claimed that the protocol is secure against several well-known attacks. However, in this paper, it is first pointed out that there exist three attacks “Measurement Attack, Modification Attack, and Collective Attack” on the mediated semi-quantum key distribution protocol without invoking quantum measurement. By proposed attacks, a malicious third party can obtain the secret key without being noticed by legitimated participants.     

Multiparty Quantum Cryptographic Protocol

We propose a multiparty quantum cryptographic protocol. Unitary operators applied by Bob and Charlie, on their respective qubits of a tripartite entangled state encoding a classical symbol that can be decoded at Alice＇s end with the help of a decoding matrix. Eve＇s presence can be detected by the disturbance of the decoding matrix. Our protocol is secure against intercept resend attacks. Furthermore, it is eifficient and deterministic in the sense that two classical bits can be transferred per entangled pair of qubits. It is worth mentioning that in this protocol, the same symbol can be used for key distribution and Eve＇s detection that enhances the etfficiency of the protocol.     

An Novel Protocol for the Quantum Secure Multi-Party Summation Based on Two-Particle Bell States

A protocol for the quantum secure multi-party summation based on two-particle Bell states is proposed. In this protocol, two-particle Bell states are used as private information carriers. Without using the entangled character of Bell states, we also use Pauli matrices operations to encode information and Hadamard matrix to extract information. The proposed protocol can also resist various attacks and overcomes the problem of information leakage with acceptable efficiency. In theory, our protocol can be used to build complex secure protocols for other multiparty computations and also lots of other important applications in distributed networks.     

Semi-quantum Dialogue Based on Single Photons

In this paper, we propose two semi-quantum dialogue (SQD) protocols by using single photons as the quantum carriers, where one requires the classical party to possess the measurement capability and the other does not have this requirement. The security toward active attacks from an outside Eve in the first SQD protocol is guaranteed by the complete robustness of present semi-quantum key distribution (SQKD) protocols, the classical one-time pad encryption, the classical party’s randomization operation and the decoy photon technology. The information leakage problem of the first SQD protocol is overcome by the classical party’ classical basis measurements on the single photons carrying messages which makes him share their initial states with the quantum party. The security toward active attacks from Eve in the second SQD protocol is guaranteed by the classical party’s randomization operation, the complete robustness of present SQKD protocol and the classical one-time pad encryption. The information leakage problem of the second SQD protocol is overcome by the quantum party’ classical basis measurements on each two adjacent single photons carrying messages which makes her share their initial states with the classical party. Compared with the traditional information leakage resistant QD protocols, the advantage of the proposed SQD protocols lies in that they only require one party to have quantum capabilities. Compared with the existing SQD protocol, the advantage of the proposed SQD protocols lies in that they only employ single photons rather than two-photon entangled states as the quantum carriers. The proposed SQD protocols can be implemented with present quantum technologies.     

High-Efficiency Three-Party Quantum Key Agreement Protocol with Quantum Dense Coding and Bell States

We propose a high-efficiency three-party quantum key agreement protocol, by utilizing two-photon polarization-entangled Bell states and a few single-photon polarization states as the information carriers, and we use the quantum dense coding method to improve its efficiency. In this protocol, each participant performs one of four unitary operations to encode their sub-secret key on the passing photons which contain two parts, the first quantum qubits of Bell states and a small number of single-photon states. At the end of this protocol, based on very little information announced by other, all participants involved can deduce the same final shared key simultaneously. We analyze the security and the efficiency of this protocol, showing that it has a high efficiency and can resist both outside attacks and inside attacks. As a consequence, our protocol is a secure and efficient three-party quantum key agreement protocol.

     

Two Quantum Key Agreement Protocols Immune to Collective Noise

In this paper, two quantum key agreement protocols are proposed, which can resist against the collective-dephasing noise and the collective-rotation noise, respectively. These two protocols mainly utilize logical quantum states, the measurement correlation property of multi-particle entangled states and the delayed measurement technique. Moreover, they have no information leakage and are congenitally free from the Trojan horse attacks. The use of the decoy state technology and the delayed measurement technique makes them secure against both participant and outsider attacks. The efficiency analysis shows that the two protocols are very efficient.     

An Efficient Protocol for the Secure Multi-party Quantum Summation

In this paper, a new and efficient quantum protocol which allows a group of mutually distrustful players to perform the summation computation is proposed. Different from previous protocols, we utilize the multi-particle entangled states as the information carriers. A third party, i.e. TP, is assumed semi-honest in the two-party quantum summation protocol. All various kinds of outside attacks and participant attacks are discussed in detail. In addition, we code all players’ Bell-basis measurement outcomes into one classical bit (cbit). Not only the cost of classical information in the public communication network is decreased, but also the security of the protocol is improved. The protocol is also generalized into multi-party quantum summation. It is secure for the collusive attack performed by at most n−2 players.     

Multi-party Quantum Key Agreement Protocol with Authentication

Utilizing the advantage of quantum entanglement swapping, a multi-party quantum key agreement protocol with authentication is proposed. In this protocol, a semi-trusted third party is introduced, who prepares Bell states, and sends one particle to multiple participants respectively. After that the participants can share a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state by entanglement swapping. Finally, these participants measure the particles in their hands and obtain an agreement key. Here, classical hash function and Hadamard operation are utilized to authenticate the identity of participants. The correlations of GHZ states ensure the security of the proposed protocol. To illustrated it detailly, the security of this protocol against common attacks is analyzed, which shows that the proposed protocol is secure in theory.

     

Quantum Secure Multiparty Computation with Symmetric Boolean Functions

We propose a class of n-variable Boolean functions which can be used to implement quantum secure multiparty computation.We also give an implementation of a special quantum secure multiparty computation protocol.An advantage of our protocol is that only 1 qubit is needed to compute the n-tuple pairwise AND function,which is more efficient comparing with previous protocols.We demonstrate our protocol on the IBM quantum cloud platform,with a probability of correct output as high as 94.63%.Therefore,our protocol presents a promising generalization in realization of various secure multipartite quantum tasks.     

Improved multiparty quantum key agreement in travelling mode

The need to simultaneously balance security and fairness in quantum key agreement (QKA) makes it challenging to design a flawless QKA protocol, especially a multiparty quantum key agreement (MQKA) protocol. When designing an MQKA protocol, two modes can be used to transmit the quantum information carriers: travelling mode and distributed mode. MQKA protocols usually have a higher qubit efficiency in travelling mode than in distributed mode. Thus, several travelling mode MQKA protocols have been proposed. However, almost all of these are vulnerable to collusion attacks from internal betrayers. This paper proposes an improved MQKA protocol that operates in travelling mode with Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pairs. More importantly, we present a new travelling mode MQKA protocol that uses single photons, which is more feasible than previous methods under current technologies.