We consider three broad classes of quantum secret sharing with and without eavesdropping and show how a graph state formalism unifies otherwise disparate quantum secret sharing models. In addition to the elegant unification provided by graph states, our approach provides a generalization of threshold classical secret sharing via insecure quantum channels beyond the current requirement of 100% collaboration by players to just a simple majority in the case of five players. Another innovation here is the introduction of embedded protocols within a larger graph state that serves as a one-way quantum-information processing system.
Quantum secret sharing (QSS) allows a dealer to distribute a secret quantum state among a set of parties so that certain subsets can reconstruct the secret, while unauthorized subsets obtain no information. While QSS was introduced over twenty years ago, previous works focused only on existence of perfectly secure schemes, and the share size of the known schemes is exponential even for access structures computed by polynomial size monotone circuits. This stands in contrast to the classical case, where efficient computationally-secure schemes have been long known for all access structures in
monotone P, and one can even obtain shares which are much shorter than the secret which is impossible with perfect security. In this work, we initiate the study of computationally-secure QSS and show that computational assumptions help significantly in building QSS schemes. We present a simple compiler and use it to obtain a large variety results: We construct polynomial-time QSS schemes under standard assumptions for a rich class of access structures. This includes many access structures for which previous results in QSS required exponential share size. We also construct QSS schemes for which the size of the shares is significantly smaller than the size of the secret. As in the classical case, this is impossible with perfect security. We also use our compiler to obtain results beyond computational QSS. In the information-theoretic setting, we improve the share size of perfect QSS schemes for a large class of access structures to
1.5n+o(n), improving upon best known schemes and matching the best known result for general access structures in the classical case. Finally, we show construct efficient schemes for all access structures in
P and
NP when the quantum secret sharing scheme is given multiple of copies of the secret.
Quantum secret sharing (QSS) allows a dealer to distribute a secret quantum state among a set of parties in such a way that certain authorized subsets can reconstruct the secret, while unauthorized subsets obtain no information about it. Previous works on QSS for general access structures focused solely on the existence of perfectly secure schemes, and the share size of the known schemes is necessarily exponential even in cases where the access structure is computed by polynomial size monotone circuits. This stands in stark contrast to the classical setting, where polynomial-time computationally-secure secret sharing schemes have been long known for all access structures computed by polynomial-size monotone circuits under standard hardness assumptions, and one can even obtain shares which are much shorter than the secret (which is impossible with perfect security). While QSS was introduced over twenty years ago, previous works only considered information-theoretic privacy. In this work, we initiate the study of computationally-secure QSS and show that computational assumptions help significantly in building QSS schemes, just as in the classical case. We present a simple compiler and use it to obtain a large variety results: We construct polynomial-time computationally-secure QSS schemes under standard hardness assumptions for a rich class of access structures. This includes many access structures for which previous results in QSS necessarily required exponential share size. In fact, we can go even further: We construct QSS schemes for which the size of the quantum shares is significantly smaller than the size of the secret. As in the classical setting, this is impossible with perfect security. We also apply our compiler to obtain results beyond computational QSS. In the information-theoretic setting, we improve the share size of perfect QSS schemes for a large class of n-party access structures to 1.5^{n+o(n)}, improving upon best known schemes and matching the best known result for general access structures in the classical setting. Finally, among other things, we study the class of access structures which can be efficiently implemented when the quantum secret sharing scheme has access to a given number of copies of the secret, including all such functions in 𝖯 and NP.
In this paper we investigate the use of quantum information to share classical secrets. While every quantum secret sharing scheme is a quantum error-correcting code, the converse is not true. Motivated by this we sought to find quantum codes which can be converted to secret sharing schemes. If we are interested in sharing classical secrets using quantum information, then we show that a class of pure
[[n,1,d]]q Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) codes can be converted to perfect secret sharing schemes. These secret sharing schemes are perfect in the sense that the unauthorized parties do not learn anything about the secret. Gottesman had given conditions to test whether a given subset is an authorized or unauthorized set; they enable us to determine the access structure of quantum secret sharing schemes. For the secret sharing schemes proposed in this paper the access structure can be characterized in terms of minimal codewords of the classical code underlying the CSS code. This characterization of the access structure for quantum secret sharing schemes is thought to be notable.
Recently, a class of quantum secret sharing schemes called communication efficient quantum threshold secret sharing schemes (CE-QTS) was introduced. These schemes reduced the communication cost during secret recovery. In this paper, we introduce a general class of communication efficient quantum secret sharing schemes (CE-QSS) which include both threshold and non-threshold schemes. We propose a framework for constructing CE-QSS schemes to generalize the earlier construction of CE-QTS schemes which was based on the staircase codes. The main component in this framework is a class of quantum codes which we call the extended Calderbank-Shor-Steane codes. These extended CSS codes could have other applications. We derive a bound on communication cost for CE-QSS schemes. Finally, we provide a construction of CE-QSS schemes meeting this bound using the proposed framework.
Secret sharing is ubiquitous throughout cryptography. All possible access structures are classically feasible, and in the case of threshold access structures, the protocols are even very efficient. However, when moving to the quantum setting, the no-cloning theorem shows that many access structures are impossible. In fact, no-cloning exactly characterizes feasibility: for thresholds, quantum secret sharing is possible if and only if the threshold
t is strictly more than
n/2.
In this work, we propose a variant of quantum secret sharing (QSS) where two or more identical copies of the input state are provided, but the output is only required to recover one copy. This notion circumvents the simple one-copy no-cloning obstruction, though the natural
k-copy generalization still gives much milder obstructions. For thresholds using
k copies, no-cloning implies that QSS is impossible whenever
t≤n/(k+1).
It is tempting to hypothesize that no-cloning continues to exactly characterize the many-copy case. However, we show that this is not the case. We give positive results showing that multiple copies allow for going slightly beyond the single-copy obstruction: for thresholds, we construct QSS whenever
t>(n−k+1)/2. On the other hand, we give a novel obstruction we call the Clique Path obstruction, which applies to arbitrary access structures. For thresholds, it shows that QSS is impossible whenever
t≤(n−1)/k. Our upper and lower bounds exactly match for
k=2. Both our results leverage connections to the
k-colorability of certain graphs derived from the access structure. We leave closing the gap for
k≥3 copies as a fascinating direction for future work.
Secret sharing is closely related to error correction, which can also be considered in the many-copy setting. Our results imply similar obstructions for quantum error correction for erasure channels.