Semi-quantum secret sharing (SQSS) protocols serve as fundamental frameworks in quantum secure multi-party computations, offering the advantage of not requiring all users to possess intricate quantum devices. However, the current landscape of SQSS protocols predominantly caters to bipartite scenarios, rendering them inadequate for practical multi-party secret sharing requirements. Addressing this gap, this paper proposes a novel SQSS protocol based on multi-particle GHZ states. In this protocol, the quantum user distributes predetermined secret information to multiple classical users with limited quantum capabilities, necessitating collaborative efforts among all classical users to reconstruct the correct secret information. By utilizing measure-flip and reflect operations, the transmitted multi-particle GHZ states can all contribute keys, thereby improving the utilization of transmitted particles. Security analysis shows that the protocol's resilience against prevalent external and internal threats. Additionally, employing IBM Qiskit, we conduct quantum circuit simulations to validate the protocol's accuracy and feasibility. Compared with similar studies, the proposed protocol has advantages in terms of protocol scalability, qubit efficiency, and shared message types.
Semi-quantum secret sharing (SQSS) protocols serve as fundamental frameworks in quantum secure multi-party computations, offering the advantage of not requiring all users to possess intricate quantum devices. However, the current landscape of SQSS protocols predominantly caters to bipartite scenarios, rendering them inadequate for practical multi-party secret sharing requirements. Addressing this gap, this paper proposes a novel SQSS protocol based on multi-particle GHZ states. In this protocol, the quantum user distributes predetermined secret information to multiple classical users with limited quantum capabilities, necessitating collaborative efforts among all classical users to reconstruct the correct secret information. By utilizing measure-flip and reflect operations, the transmitted multi-particle GHZ states can all contribute keys, thereby improving the utilization of transmitted particles. Security analysis shows that the protocol's resilience against prevalent external and internal threats. Additionally, employing IBM Qiskit, we conduct quantum circuit simulations to validate the protocol's accuracy and feasibility. Compared with similar studies, the proposed protocol has advantages in terms of protocol scalability, qubit efficiency, and shared message types.
Abstract Semi-quantum secret sharing (SQSS) protocols serve as fundamental frameworks in quantum secure multi-party computations, offering the advantage of not requiring all users to possess intricate quantum devices. However, current SQSS protocols mainly cater to bipartite scenarios, with few protocols suitable for multi-party scenarios. Moreover, the multi-party SQSS protocols face limitations such as low qubit efficiency and inability to share deterministic secret information. To address this gap, this paper proposes a multi-party SQSS protocol based on multi-particle GHZ states. In this protocol, the quantum user can distribute the predetermined secret information to multiple classical users with limited quantum capabilities, and only through mutual cooperation among all classical users can the correct secret information be reconstructed. By utilizing measure-flip and reflect operations, the transmitted multi-particle GHZ states can all contribute keys, thereby improving the utilization of transmitted particles. Then, security analysis shows that the protocol’s resilience against prevalent external and internal threats. Additionally, employing IBM Qiskit, we conduct quantum circuit simulations to validate the protocol’s accuracy and feasibility. Finally, compared to similar studies, the proposed protocol has advantages in terms of protocol scalability, qubit efficiency, and shared message types.
Abstract Semi-quantum secret sharing (SQSS) is a branch of quantum cryptography, with the advantage of fewer quantum resources. In this paper, we present a SQSS protocol based on hybrid single particle and GHZ-type states. Our protocol adopts circular transport structure to share secret information between classical and quantum parties, employing the entanglement correlation and uncertainty of GHZ-type states to guarantee the security of the transmission. Security analysis indicates that the proposed SQSS protocol enables resilience against various potential attacks such as measure-resend, entangle-measure, internal, and Trojan attacks. Furthermore, our protocol is easy to generalize to multi-party scenarios without increasing the complexity of state preparation. Compared with some typical SQSS protocols, our protocol has higher qubit efficiency without the need for entanglement swapping operations. The proposed SQSS protocol has the potential for broader applications in practical scenarios.
The security of a secret sharing protocol is compromised if one or more dishonest participants can reconstruct the secret by deviating from the prescribed protocol, particularly when such malicious behavior remains undetected. Semi-Quantum Secret Sharing (SQSS) is a variant of secret sharing in which the participants possess only classical capabilities, such as preparing and measuring qubits in the computational (Z) basis, while a quantum-capable third party assists the dealer in generating and distributing quantum shares of a classical secret. The limited quantum capabilities of the participants in SQSS protocols may introduce vulnerabilities to collusion attacks, enabling an assisting quantum third party, in collaboration with a dishonest classical participant, to jointly recover the secret even without detection. In this work, we propose a novel SQSS protocol that eliminates this vulnerability and achieves information-theoretic security against collusion attacks. We further prove that the proposed protocol is secure against a broad class of external and internal attacks. Finally, a comparative analysis demonstrates that our construction advances existing SQSS protocols by simultaneously optimizing qubit efficiency, involves a classical dealer, and resilience against DCNA attacks using basic Bell states.
Abstract Semi-quantum secret sharing (SQSS) is an important branch of semi-quantum cryptography, and differs from quantum secret sharing (QSS) in that not all parties are required to possess quantum capabilities. All previous SQSS protocols have three common features: (i) they adopt product states or entangled states as initial quantum resource; (ii) the particles prepared by quantum party are transmitted in a tree-type way; and (iii) they require the classical parties to possess the measurement capability. In this paper, two circular SQSS protocols with single particles are suggested, where the first one requires the classical parties to possess the measurement capability while the second one does not have this requirement. Compared with the previous SQSS protocols, the proposed SQSS protocols have some distinct features: (i) they adopt single particles rather than product states or entangled states as initial quantum resource; (ii) the particles prepared by quantum party are transmitted in a circular way; and (iii) the second protocol releases the classical parties from the measurement capability. The proposed SQSS protocols are robust against some famous attacks from an eavesdropper, such as the measure-resend attack, the intercept-resend attack and the entangle-measure attack, and are feasible with present quantum technologies in reality .
Quantum secret sharing (QSS) is a cryptographic protocol that utilizes fundamental principles of quantum mechanics to securely distribute and reconstruct secret information among multiple participants. Most existing protocols rely on entangled states (such as Bell and GHZ states), but in practical applications. The preparation of entangled state is constrained by a short quantum coherence time, low state fidelity, etc., which makes it difficult to implement entangled resource-dependent QSS protocols. In this work, a novel practical and verifiable multi-party QSS protocol is proposed based on orthogonal product states, which are easier to prepare than entangled states. During the protocol preparation stage, the secret distributor first converts pre-shared classical secret information into the corresponding orthogonal product states according to the encoding rules, and pre-shares a communication key with participants via quantum key distribution (QKD), which is used to hide the initial quantum sequence information through subsequent particle transformation operations. After preparing the orthogonal product states, the distributor reorganizes the particles by position, extracting particles at the same position from each state to form new sequences, shuffling their order, then applying Hadamard operations using a pre-shared key, inserting decoy particles, and sending the sequences to the participants. After receiving it, participants conduct eavesdropping detection, use the same key for the inverse transformations, retain one particle from each sequence, and sequentially pass the remaining particles until the last participant receives a complete set, triggering state verification with the arbiter distributor. If the verification is successful, the particles will be returned to the first participant and the return stage will follow the same procedure. Only after both the transmission and return stage verifications have passed, will the distributor reveal the initial particle positions, allowing participants to collaboratively reconstruct the secret. In the protocol, the secret distributor acts as an arbitrator to verify the particle state information together with participants at designated points (the end of the transmission stage and the end of the return stage) in order to determine whether the particle-state information is error-free during transmission. If the verification fails at either stage, the protocol will be terminated immediately. Meanwhile, considering that the number of participants may change during the execution of the protocol, a dynamic scheme for personnel changes is designed to ensure the flexibility of the protocol. Through the analysis of possible internal and external attacks, It can be proven that our protocol can effectively resist the existing common attack. Using Qiskit simulation experiments, the core quantum procedures of the protocol can be successfully modeled. The experimental results provide strong computational validation of the theoretical feasibility of the protocol.
This study proposes a multiparty single-photon semi-quantum secret sharing (SQSS) protocol to simultaneously improve quantum bit (qubit) efficiency and practical feasibility. Existing quantum secret sharing protocols typically assume that all participants possess full quantum capabilities, which limits their deployment in real-world environments. To address this issue, the proposed protocol was designed using a semi-quantum model, allowing N agents with limited quantum capabilities to participate in the secret-sharing process. In terms of efficiency, the proposed protocol employs single photons as quantum resources and is analyzed under a unified definition of qubit efficiency. The results show that the qubit efficiency of the proposed protocol reaches 2N1 , which is comparable to the best recent quantum secret sharing protocols and outperforms most existing SQSS methods. Unlike certain protocols in which qubit efficiency decreases exponentially with the number of participants, the quantum resource consumption of the proposed protocol increases linearly with the number of agents. Consequently, its qubit efficiency decreases proportionally to N1 , rather than exponentially, providing better scalability as the number of agents increases. In terms of security, the protocol is analyzed against several attack models, including intercept-resend, entangle-and-measure, collective, and collusion attacks. The analysis shows that an adversary cannot obtain useful information without detection under these attacks, demonstrating the robustness of the proposed protocol.