Cryptanalysis and Improvement of a Multiparty Quantum Direct Secret Sharing of Classical Messages with Bell States and Bell Measurements

Recently, a multiparty quantum direct secret sharing protocol with Bell states was presented (Song et al., Int. J Theor. Phys. 57, 1559, 2018). In this protocol, the secret message of the dealer is directly encoding into the transmitted particles. All agents obtain their pieces of secret by making Bell state measurement on their receiving particles, then cooperate to recover the dealer’s secret. However, as we show, this protocol is insecure, because an outside attacker or two special dishonest agents can eavesdrop the secret fully. Furthermore, an improved version of this protocol is proposed, which can stand against the presented attacks.