We introduce and analyze approximate quantum secret sharing in a formal cryptographic setting, wherein a dealer encodes and distributes a quantum secret to players such that authorized structures (sets of subsets of players) can approximately reconstruct the quantum secret and omnipotent adversarial agents controlling nonauthorized subsets of players are approximately denied the quantum secret. In particular, viewing the map encoding the quantum secret shares for players in an authorized structure as a quantum channel, we show that approximate reconstructability of the quantum secret by these players is possible if and only if the information leakage, given in terms of a certain entanglement-assisted capacity of the complementary quantum channel to the players outside the structure and the environment, is small.
We introduce and analyze approximate quantum secret sharing in a formal cryptographic setting, wherein a dealer encodes and distributes a quantum secret to players such that authorized structures (sets of subsets of players) can approximately reconstruct the quantum secret and omnipotent adversarial agents controlling nonauthorized subsets of players are approximately denied the quantum secret. In particular, viewing the map encoding the quantum secret shares for players in an authorized structure as a quantum channel, we show that approximate reconstructability of the quantum secret by these players is possible if and only if the information leakage, given in terms of a certain entanglement-assisted capacity of the complementary quantum channel to the players outside the structure and the environment, is small.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 monotoneP, 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.
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.