A protocol for three-party quantum secure direct communication based on Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) states was recently proposed by Jin et al. [Phys. Lett. A 354 (2006) 67] By analysing the protocol we find some security loopholes, e.g. one bit of secret messages of a party (Alice in the original paper) can always be leaked straight to the public without any eavesdropping. These problems suggested previously are discussed and possible solutions are presented to improve the security of the original protocol.
We present an efficient scheme for the complete analysis of hyperentangled Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) state in polarization and time-bin degrees of freedom with two steps. Firstly, the polarization GHZ state is distinguished completely and nondestructively, resorting to the controlled phase flip (CPF) gate constructed by the cavity-assisted interaction. Subsequently, the time-bin GHZ state is analyzed by using the preserved polarization entanglement. With the help of CPF gate and self-assisted mechanism, our scheme can be directly generalized to the complete N-photon hyperentangled GHZ state analysis, and it may have potential applications in the hyperentanglement-based quantum communication.