Secret sharing of a quantum state, or quantum secret sharing, in which a dealer wants to share a certain amount of quantum information with a few players, has wide applications in quantum information. The critical criterion in a threshold secret sharing scheme is confidentiality: with less than the designated number of players, no information can be recovered. Furthermore, in a quantum scenario, one additional critical criterion exists: the capability of sharing entangled and unknown quantum information. Here, by employing a six-photon entangled state, we demonstrate a quantum threshold scheme, where the shared quantum secrecy can be efficiently reconstructed with a state fidelity as high as 93%. By observing that any one or two parties cannot recover the secrecy, we show that our scheme meets the confidentiality criterion. Meanwhile, we also demonstrate that entangled quantum information can be shared and recovered via our setting, which shows that our implemented scheme is fully quantum. Moreover, our experimental setup can be treated as a decoding circuit of the five-qubit quantum error-correcting code with two erasure errors.
Secret sharing of a quantum state, or quantum secret sharing, in which a dealer wants to share a certain amount of quantum information with a few players, has wide applications in quantum information. The critical criterion in a threshold secret sharing scheme is confidentiality: with less than the designated number of players, no information can be recovered. Furthermore, in a quantum scenario, one additional critical criterion exists: the capability of sharing entangled and unknown quantum information. Here, by employing a six-photon entangled state, we demonstrate a quantum threshold scheme, where the shared quantum secrecy can be efficiently reconstructed with a state fidelity as high as 93%. By observing that any one or two parties cannot recover the secrecy, we show that our scheme meets the confidentiality criterion. Meanwhile, we also demonstrate that entangled quantum information can be shared and recovered via our setting, which shows that our implemented scheme is fully quantum. Moreover, our experimental setup can be treated as a decoding circuit of the five-qubit quantum error-correcting code with two erasure errors.
Secret sharing of a quantum state, or quantum secret sharing, in which a dealer wants to share certain amount of quantum information with a few players, has wide applications in quantum information.The critical criterion in a threshold secret sharing scheme is confidentiality; with less than the designated number of players, no information can be recovered.Furthermore, in a quantum scenario, one additional critical criterion exists; the capability of sharing entangled and unknown quantum information.Here by employing a six-photon entangled state, we demonstrate a quantum threshold scheme, where the shared quantum secrecy can be efficiently reconstructed with a state fidelity as high as 93%.By observing that any one or two parties cannot recover the secrecy, we show that our scheme meets the confidentiality criterion.Meanwhile, we also demonstrate that entangled quantum information can be shared and recovered via our setting, which demonstrates that our implemented scheme is fully quantum.Moreover, our experimental setup can be treated as a decoding circuit of the 5-qubit quantum error-correcting code with two erasure errors.
A quantum secret sharing scheme is a cryptographic protocol by which a dealer can share a secret among a group of n players so that only certain subsets of players can recover the secret by collaboration. In this paper we propose communication efficient quantum threshold secret sharing schemes. They minimize the amount of quantum communication required to reconstruct the secret when more than the necessary number of players collaborate. They are based on a class of staircase codes proposed by Bitar and El Rouayheb. In a standard ((k,n)) quantum threshold scheme, any subset of k or more players can recover the secret. The quantum communication cost for reconstruction in such schemes is k qudits for each secret qudit. Using the proposed construction, any subset of $d\ensuremath{\ge}k$ players can also collaborate to recover the secret with a communication cost of d qudits for $d\ensuremath{-}k+1$ secret qudits. In other words, for the proposed schemes the quantum communication cost is only $\frac{d}{d\ensuremath{-}k+1}$ qudits for every secret qudit. For d>k, proposed schemes are communication efficient with respect to standard schemes; and when $d=2k\ensuremath{-}1$, the quantum communication cost is reduced by a factor O(k). Further, when $n=2k\ensuremath{-}1$, the proposed schemes have optimal communication cost for secret reconstruction.
Abstract Threshold quantum secret sharing is a cryptography technique for dividing and reconstructing secret information. The dealer shares a secret based on quantum mechanics principles, and a subset of participants cooperate to recover that secret. For example, in k , n quantum threshold scheme and n , n quantum threshold scheme, the former can only reconstruct the secret when at least k shares are collected. The latter requires all n shares to be collected to reconstruct the secret. However, in real scenarios, the priority of participant identities may vary. In order to meet the actual needs of participants with different rights, this paper proposes a w , ω , n quantum secret sharing (QSS) scheme. When the sum of participants’ weights w is greater than or equal to a threshold ω, they can cooperate to reconstruct the secret. In order to achieve this, this paper uses the entangled state of single particles and constructs a verifiable QSS scheme based on the Chinese remainder theorem. Significantly, in case of a dishonest participant, the dealer can delete the participant before recovering the secret to ensure the security of the communication. This scheme is more flexible than other threshold protocols. At the same time, it reduces the communication cost of the participants. In addition, security analysis shows that the scheme resists typical external and internal attacks.
In this paper, a standard (3, 5)-threshold quantum secret sharing scheme is presented, in which any three of five participants can resume cooperatively the classical secret from the dealer, but one or two shares contain absolutely no information about the secret. Our scheme can be fulfilled by using the singular properties of maximally entangled 6-qubit states found by Borras. We analyze the scheme's security by several ways, for example, intercept-and-resend attack, entangle-and-measure attack, and so on. Compared with the other standard threshold quantum secret sharing schemes, our scheme needs neither to use d-level multipartite entangled states, nor to produce shares by classical secret splitting techniques, so it is feasible to be realized.
We introduce a multiparty cryptographic protocol, which we call entanglement sharing schemes, wherein a dealer retains half of a maximally entangled bipartite state and encodes the other half into a multipartite state that is distributed among multiple players. In a close analog to quantum secret sharing, some subsets of players can recover maximal entanglement with the dealer whereas other subsets can recover no entanglement (though they may retain classical correlations with the dealer). We find a lower bound on the share size for such schemes and construct two nontrivial examples based on Shor's [[9,1,3]] and the [[4,2,2]] stabilizer code; we further demonstrate how other examples may be obtained from quantum error correcting codes through classical encryption. Finally, we demonstrate that entanglement sharing schemes can be applied to characterize leaked information in quantum ramp secret sharing.
Quantum secret sharing is a cryptographic scheme that enables the secure storage and reconstruction of quantum information. While the theory of secret sharing is mature in its development, relatively few studies have explored the performance of quantum secret sharing on actual devices. In this work, we provide a pedagogical description of encoding and decoding circuits for different secret sharing codes, and we test their performance on IBM’s 127-qubit Brisbane system. We evaluate the quality of the implementation by performing a SWAP test between the decoded state and the ideal one, as well as by estimating how well the code preserves entanglement with a reference system. The results indicate that a ((3,5)) threshold secret sharing scheme and a non-threshold 7-qubit scheme perform similarly based on the SWAP test and entanglement fidelity, with both attaining a roughly 70–75% pass rate on the SWAP test for the reconstructed secret. We also investigate one implementation of a ((2,3)) qutrit threshold scheme and find that it performs the worst of all, which is expected due to the additional number of multi-qubit gate operations needed to encode and decode qutrits. A comparison is also made between schemes using mid-circuit measurement versus delayed-circuit measurement.