While secure communication between two quantum parties has been shown possible theoretically, what is the possible direct communication between a full quantum capability sender Alice and a limited quantum capability receiver Bob? This is called Semi- Quantum Direct Communication (SQDC). Several protocols have been proposed for secure SQDC. However, they all need a pre-shared key and at least linear entanglement preservation time, as well as a linear number of quantum bit registers, with respect to message length. Besides, complex hardware implementation (including quantum bit permutations) decreases the transmission efficiency. This paper introduces a no-key SQDC protocol requiring only constant entanglement preservation time and a fixed number of quantum bit registers by adding an authentic public classical channel. The quantum circuit complexity of Alice decreases considerably as well as the number of quantum bits transmitted for sending a fixed length message. Moreover, the protocol is provably secure if some precondition is satisfied.
While secure communication between two quantum parties has been shown possible theoretically, what is the possible direct communication between a full quantum capability sender Alice and a limited quantum capability receiver Bob? This is called Semi- Quantum Direct Communication (SQDC). Several protocols have been proposed for secure SQDC. However, they all need a pre-shared key and at least linear entanglement preservation time, as well as a linear number of quantum bit registers, with respect to message length. Besides, complex hardware implementation (including quantum bit permutations) decreases the transmission efficiency. This paper introduces a no-key SQDC protocol requiring only constant entanglement preservation time and a fixed number of quantum bit registers by adding an authentic public classical channel. The quantum circuit complexity of Alice decreases considerably as well as the number of quantum bits transmitted for sending a fixed length message. Moreover, the protocol is provably secure if some precondition is satisfied.
Full quantum capability devices can provide secure communications, but they are challenging to make portable given the current technology. Besides, classical portable devices are unable to construct communication channels resistant to quantum computers. Hence, communication security on portable devices cannot be guaranteed. Semi-Quantum Communication (SQC) attempts to break the quandary by lowering the receiver's required quantum capability so that secure communications can be implemented on a portable device. However, all SQC protocols have low qubit efficiency and complex hardware implementations. The protocols involving quantum entanglement require linear Entanglement Preservation Time (EPT) and linear quregister size. In this paper, we propose two new keyless SQC protocols that address the aforementioned weaknesses. They are named Economic Keyless Semi-Quantum Point-to-point Communication (EKSQPC) and Rate Estimation EKSQPC (REKSQPC). They achieve theoretically constant minimal EPT and quregister size, regardless of message length. We show that the new protocols, with low overhead, can detect Measure and Replay Attacks (MRAs). REKSQDC is tolerant to transmission impairments and environmental perturbations. The protocols are based on a new quantum message transmission operation termed Tele-Fetch. Like QKD, their strength depends on physical principles rather than mathematical complexity.
Semi-quantum secure direct communication allows the quantum party and the classical party to transmit secure messages directly, but does not need sharing a secret key in advance. To increase the information transmission efficiency and practicability of semi-quantum secure direct communication, a bidirectional semi-quantum secure direct communication protocol with high-dimensional single-particle states is designed. The proposed protocol involves quantum party Alice and classical party Bob. Each participant can receive a secret message while sending a secret message. Unlike most of existing quantum secure direct communication protocols, it is not necessary for the classical party Bob in the proposed protocol to possess the capability of measuring quantum states, which greatly enhances the feasibility of the protocol. The protocol allows the classical party Bob to implement the unitary operations on particles and reorder the quantum sequence. Furthermore, the quantum party Alice and the classical party Bob can verify the correctness of the received secret message with the Hash function. Security analysis indicates that without being discovered by the legitimate participants, Eve cannot obtain the secret message with common attack, such as intercept-resend attack, measure-resend attack, tampering attack and entanglement-measure attack. Compared with the typical semi-quantum secure direct communication protocols, the proposed protocol has a high qubit efficiency of about 28.6%. In addition, the transmission efficiency of secret message is greatly enhanced, since the proposed protocol utilizes the high-dimensional single-particle states as the carrier of secret message.
Full quantum capability devices can provide secure communications, but they are challenging to make portable given the current technology. Besides, classical portable devices are unable to construct communication channels resistant to quantum computers. Hence, communication security on portable devices cannot be guaranteed. Semi-Quantum Communication (SQC) attempts to break the quandary by lowering the receiver's required quantum capability so that secure communications can be implemented on a portable device. However, all SQC protocols have low qubit efficiency and complex hardware implementations. The protocols involving quantum entanglement require linear Entanglement Preservation Time (EPT) and linear quregister size. In this paper, we propose two new keyless SQC protocols that address the aforementioned weaknesses. They are named Economic Keyless Semi-Quantum Point-to-point Communication (EKSQPC) and Rate Estimation EKSQPC (REKSQPC). They achieve theoretically constant minimal EPT and quregister size, regardless of message length. We show that the new protocols, with low overhead, can detect Measure and Replay Attacks (MRA). REKSQDC is tolerant to transmission impairments and environmental perturbations. The protocols are based on a new quantum message transmission operation termed Tele-Fetch. Like QKD, their strength depends on physical principles rather than mathematical complexity.
Two schemes for quantum secure conditional direct communication are proposed, where a set of EPR pairs of maximally entangled particles in Bell states, initially made by the supervisor Charlie, but shared by the sender Alice and the receiver Bob, functions as quantum information channels for faithful transmission. After insuring the security of the quantum channel and obtaining the permission of Charlie (i.e., Charlie is trustworthy and cooperative, which means the "conditional" in the two schemes), Alice and Bob begin their private communication under the control of Charlie. In the first scheme, Alice transmits secret message to Bob in a deterministic manner with the help of Charlie by means of Alice's local unitary transformations, both Alice and Bob's local measurements, and both of Alice and Charlie's public classical communication. In the second scheme, the secure communication between Alice and Bob can be achieved via public classical communication of Charlie and Alice, and the local measurements of both Alice and Bob. The common feature of these protocols is that the communications between two communication parties Alice and Bob depend on the agreement of the third side Charlie. Moreover, transmitting one bit secret message, the sender Alice only needs to apply a local operation on her one qubit and send one bit classical information. We also show that the two schemes are completely secure if quantum channels are perfect.
We define a keyless communication as a message sent from one party (Alice) to another (Bob), such that the message is totally secure. This means that if a third party (Eve) is trying to eavesdrop, she will receive only random bits. She cannot understand the content of the message, even if she is able to intercept it in such away that Alice and Bob do not know it has been intercepted. For such a totally secure message, Alice and Bob do not need to set up any key beforehand, as it can add no further security. Starting with a system that we felt sure met such criteria, we were shocked to find out that it could be broken in at least two ways, by a semi-classical method and by a quantum method, such that Eve could read a message and Alice and Bob would not know it. Alice and Bob can counter such eavesdropping, but only by sending out test messages. This will enable them to ascertain that Eve is on the line, but then she can still occasionally pick up snippets of their conversation. In that case, in order to be totally secure, it is better to establish an unbreakable key beforehand. We postulate and give plausibility arguments that in general it is impossible to establish keyless communication between two parties.
Quantum secure direct communication allows one participant to transmit secret messages to another directly without generating a shared secret key first. In most of the existing schemes, quantum secure direct communication can be achieved only when the two participants have full quantum ability. In this paper, we propose two semi-quantum secure direct communication protocols to allow restricted semi-quantum or “classical” users to participate in quantum communication. A semi-quantum user is restricted to measure, prepare, reorder and reflect quantum qubits only in the classical basis [Formula: see text]. Both protocols rely on quantum Alice to randomly prepare Bell states, perform Bell basis measurements and publish the initial Bell states, but the semi-quantum Bob only needs to measure the qubits in classical basis to obtain secret information without quantum memory. Security and qubit efficiency analysis have been given in this paper. The analysis results show that the two protocols can avoid some eavesdropping attacks and their qubit efficiency is higher than some current related quantum or semi-quantum protocols.