Quantum Secret Sharing Protocol between Multiparty and Multiparty with Single Photons and Unitary Transformations

We propose a scheme of quantum secret sharing between Alice＇s group and Bob＇s group with single photons and unitary transformations. In the protocol, one member in Alice＇s group prepares a sequence of single photons in one of four different states, while other members directly encode their information on the sequence of single photons via unitary operations; after that, the last member sends the sequence of single photons to Bob＇s group. Then Bob＇s, except for the last one, do work similarly. Finally the last member in Bob＇s group measures the qubits. If the security of the quantum channel is guaranteed by some tests, then the qubit states sent by the last member of Alice＇s group can be used as key bits for secret sharing. It is shown that this scheme is safe.     

Deterministic secure quantum communication against collective-dephasing noise by using EPR pairs and auxiliary photons

A deterministic secure quantum communication against collective-dephasing noise is proposed. Alice constructs two sets of three-photon bases with EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) pairs in the state |Ψ⁺〉 or |Ψ^-〉 and auxiliary single photons in the state |H〉. And then she sends them to Bob. Bob can get the secret message by his single-photon measurement outcomes and two public message strings from Alice if the quantum channel is secure. The scheme does not need photon storing technique and only single-photon measurement is necessary.     

Efficient high-capacity quantum secret sharing with two-photon entanglement

An efficient high-capacity quantum secret sharing scheme is proposed following some ideas in quantum dense coding with two-photon entanglement. The message sender, Alice prepares and measures the two-photon entangled states, and the two agents, Bob and Charlie code their information on their photons with four local unitary operations, which makes this scheme more convenient for the agents than others. This scheme has a high intrinsic efficiency for qubits and a high capacity.     

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.     

Quantum cryptography using partially entangled states

We show that non-maximally entangled states can be used to build a quantum key distribution (QKD) scheme where the key is probabilistically teleported from Alice to Bob. This probabilistic aspect of the protocol ensures the security of the key without the need of non-orthogonal states to encode it, in contrast to other QKD schemes. Also, the security and key transmission rate of the present protocol is nearly equivalent to those of standard QKD schemes and these aspects can be controlled by properly harnessing the new free parameter in the present proposal, namely, the degree of partial entanglement. Furthermore, we discuss how to build a controlled QKD scheme, also based on partially entangled states, where a third party can decide whether or not Alice and Bob are allowed to share a key.     

Quantum Overloading Cryptography Using Single-Photon Nonlocality

Using the single-photon nonlocality, we propose a quantum novel overloading cryptography scheme, in which a single photon carries two bits information in one-way quantum channel. Two commutative modes of the single photon, the polarization mode and the spatial mode, are used to encode secret information. Strict time windows are set to detect the impersonation attack. The spatial mode which denotes the existence of photons is noncommutative with the phase of the photon, so that our scheme is secure against photon-number-splitting attack. Our protocol may be secure against individual attack.     

High-capacity three-party quantum secret sharing with superdense coding

This paper presents a scheme for high-capacity three-party quantum secret sharing with quantum superdense coding, following some ideas in the work by Liu et al (2002 Phys. Rev. A 65 022304) and the quantum secret sharing scheme by Deng et al (2008 Phys. Lett. A 372 1957). Instead of using two sets of nonorthogonal states, the boss Alice needs only to prepare a sequence of Einstein--Podolsky--Rosen pairs in d-dimension. The two agents Bob and Charlie encode their information with dense coding unitary operations, and security is checked by inserting decoy photons. The scheme has a high capacity and intrinsic efficiency as each pair can carry 2lbd bits of information, and almost all the pairs can be used for carrying useful information.     

High-Capacity Three-Party Quantum Secret Sharing with Single Photons in Both the Polarization and the Spatial-Mode Degrees of Freedom

We present a high-capacity three-party quantum secret sharing (QSS) protocol with a sequence of single photons in both the polarization and the spatial-mode degrees of freedom. By inserting the boss Alice into the middle position between the two agents Bob and Charlie, our QSS protocol is secure in theory. The boss Alice chooses some unitary operations to encode her information on the single photons. It is interesting to point out the fact that Alice does not change the bases of the single photons which are used to carry the useful information about the private key, which improves its success probability for obtaining a private key. Compared with the QSS protocol by Zhou et al. (Chin. Phys. Lett. 24, 2181 (2007)), our QSS protocol has a higher capacity without increasing the difficulty of its implementation in experiment as each correlated photon can carry two bits of useful information. Compared with those QSS protocols based on entangled photon pairs and Bell-state measurements, our QSS protocol is more feasible as it does not require the complete Bell-state analysis which is not easy with linear optics. We give out the setup for the implementation of our QSS protocol with linear optical elements.     

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.     

Quantum Authencryption with Two-Photon Entangled States for Off-Line Communicants

In this paper, a quantum authencryption protocol is proposed by using the two-photon entangled states as the quantum resource. Two communicants Alice and Bob share two private keys in advance, which determine the generation of two-photon entangled states. The sender Alice sends the two-photon entangled state sequence encoded with her classical bits to the receiver Bob in the manner of one-step quantum transmission. Upon receiving the encoded quantum state sequence, Bob decodes out Alice’s classical bits with the two-photon joint measurements and authenticates the integrity of Alice’s secret with the help of one-way hash function. The proposed protocol only uses the one-step quantum transmission and needs neither a public discussion nor a trusted third party. As a result, the proposed protocol can be adapted to the case where the receiver is off-line, such as the quantum E-mail systems. Moreover, the proposed protocol provides the message authentication to one bit level with the help of one-way hash function and has an information-theoretical efficiency equal to 100 %.     

Multiparty Quantum Remote Secret Conference

We present two schemes for multiparty quantum remote secret conference in which each legitimate conferee can read out securely the secret message announced by another, but a vicious eavesdropper can get nothing about it. The first one is based on the same key shared efficiently and securely by all the parties with Greenberger-Horne- Zeilinger （GHZ） states, and each conferee sends his secret message to the others with one-time pad crypto-system. The other one is based on quantum encryption with a quantum key~ a sequence of GHZ states shared among all the conferees and used repeatedly after confirming their security. Both these schemes are optimal as their intrinsic efficiency for qubits approaches the maximal value.     

An Efficient Scheme for Multiparty Multi-particle State Sharing

We present an efficient scheme for sharing an arbitrary m-qubitstate with n agents. In our scheme, the sender Alice first shares mBell states with the agent Bob, who is designated to recover the originalm-qubit state. Furthermore, Alice introduces n-1 auxiliary particlesin the initial state |0>, applies Hadamard (H) gate and Controlled-Not (CNOT) gate operations on the particles, which make them entangled with one of m particle pairs in Bell states, and then sends them to the controllers (i.e., other n-1 agents), where each controller only holds one particle in hand. After Alice performing m Bell-basis measurements and each controller a single-particle measurement, the recover Bob can obtain the original unknown quantum state by applying the corresponding local unitary operations on his particles.Its intrinsic efficiency for qubits approaches 100%, and the total efficiency really approaches the maximal value.     

High-Capacity Three-Party Quantum Secret Sharing With Hyperentanglement

We presents a novel scheme for high-capacity three-party quantum secret sharing (QSS) with the hyperentanglement in both the polarization and the spatial-mode degrees of freedom of photon pairs. The boss Alice need only prepare a sequence of photon pairs and some decoy photons. Her two agents measure their photons received from the boss Alice with two bases by choosing two unsymmetrical probabilities. The present QSS scheme has a high capacity as each pair can carry 2 bits of information, several times as other QSS schemes. Moreover, our setups with linear optical elements show that our QSS scheme does not increase the difficulty of its implementation in experiment and it is feasible with current techniques.     

Secure quantum telephone

A quantum telephone protocol including the dialing process and the talking one is proposed. In the dialing process, with their respective secret keys, the legitimate communicators Alice and Bob can pass the authentication by Charlie acting as a telephone company. In the talking process, Charlie provides the authenticated Alice and Bob with a quantum channel sequence, on which Alice and Bob can communicate with each other directly and privately by virtue of some encoding operations. Different from the insecure classical telephone having been used in our lives, the proposed quantum telephone protocol has asymptotically security and the communicators cannot disavow having used the quantum channels.     

Multiparty Quantum Chatting Scheme

We propose a new multiparty simultaneous quantum direct communication scheme based on Creen-Horne- Zeilinger （CHZ） states and dense coding. For achieving high efficiency without leaking any information, four encoding schemes are prepared in advance. The present scheme has the capacity of transmitting （M ＋ 1）M classical bits per group of M-particle CHZ states when there exist M parties. The technique of rearranging particles makes the legal users coequally exchange their messages in the same length. Both high efficiency and excellent security against the common attacks are virtues of this new scheme.     

An efficient two-step quantum key distribution protocol with orthogonal product states

An efficient two-step quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol with orthogonal product states in the n\otimes n(n\geq3)Hilbert space is presented. In this protocol, the particles in the orthogonal product states form two particle sequences. The sender, Alice, first sends one sequence to the receiver, Bob. After Bob receives the first particle sequence, Alice and Bob check eavesdropping by measuring a fraction of particles randomly chosen. After ensuring the security of the quantum channel, Alice sends the other particle sequence to Bob. By making an orthogonal measurement on the two particle sequences, Bob can obtain the information of the orthogonal product states sent by Alice. This protocol has many distinct features such as great capacity, high efficiency in that it uses all orthogonal product states in distributing the key except those chosen for checking eavesdroppers.     

Multiparty quantum secret sharing of secure direct communication using single photons

We propose a protocol for multiparty quantum secret sharing of secure direct communication using single photons. In this protocol, random phase shift operations instead of some special discrete unitary operations used usually are employed to realize the sharing controls. The security of this protocol with respect to various kinds of attacks is discussed. Due to the complete randomicity of the phase shift characterizing the unitary operations, the security of secret sharing is therefore enhanced.     

High-Capacity Quantum Secret Sharing with Hyperdense Coding Assisted by Hyperentangled Photon Pairs

We presents a high-capacity three-party quantum secret sharing (QSS) protocol with a sequence of photon pairs in hyperentangled Bell states in both the polarization and the spatial-mode degrees of freedom. In our scheme, the boss Alice prepares a sequence of photon pairs in hyperentangled Bell states and divides them into two photon sequences which are sent the two agents, respectively. Alice exploits four subsets of decoy photons to assure the security of the photon transmission between her and her agents. The present QSS scheme has the advantage of having a high channel capacity as each photon pair can carry 4 bits of secret message in principle, two times of that by Deng et al. (Phys. Lett. A 372: 1957, 2008). We give out the setups for the preparation of the photon pairs in hyperentangled Bell states with a beta barium borate crystal and the manipulation of the photons with linear optical elements. It will be shown that our QSS protocol is feasible with current experimental technology.     

Quantum state sharing of an arbitrary m-qudit state with two-qudit entanglements and generalized Bell-state measurements

A scheme for quantum state sharing of an arbitrary m-qudit state is proposed with two-qudit entanglements and generalized Bell-state (GBS) measurements. In this scheme, the sender Alice should perform m two-particle GBS measurements on her 2m qudits, and the controllers also take GBS measurements on their qudits and transfer their quantum information to the receiver with entanglement swapping if the agents cooperate. We discuss two topological structures for this quantum state sharing scheme, a dispersive one and a circular one. The former is better at the aspect of security than the latter as it requires the number of the agents who should cooperate for recovering the quantum secret larger than the other one.     

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.