Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

IEEE Access

Efficient Multiparty Quantum Key Agreement With a Single $d$ -Level Quantum System Secure Against Collusive Attack

Zhiwei Sun, Chunhui Wu, Shenggen Zheng, Cai Zhang

Published Jan 1, 2019• 19 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Recently, multiparty quantum key agreement (MQKA) protocols have gained increasing attention. Several MQKA protocols in the traveling mode have been proposed for higher key generation rates, which, however, are vulnerable to a collusive attack presented by Liu. In this paper, an analysis of Liu's collusive attacks on Cao et al.'s protocol is given, based on which an efficient MQKA protocol that requires only sequential communication of a single d-level quantum system is put forward. Because of the single d-level quantum system, our protocol has huge advantages in scalability and can be realized with the state-of-the-art technology. The scalability means that each additional participant is only required to perform a unitary operator that is comparatively simple, and the complexity of measurements remains independent of the number of participants. Our protocol can also resist Liu's collusive attacks due to the encrypted quantum channel and has an efficiency rate of 1/2N(N is the number of participants) that is much better than those of other quantum key agreement protocols. In addition, by using the proposed encoding method, a wide class of problems for which quantum information protocols based on multisystem entanglement can be mapped into much simpler ones involving only one system.

DOI
10.1109/access.2019.2931612

Related papers

Efficient multiparty quantum key agreement with collective detection

Wei Huang, Qi Su, Bin Liu +3 more

As a burgeoning branch of quantum cryptography, quantum key agreement is a kind of key establishing processes where the security and fairness of the established common key should be guaranteed simultaneously. However, the difficulty on designing a qualified quantum key agreement protocol increases significantly with the increase of the number of the involved participants. Thus far, only few of the existing multiparty quantum key agreement (MQKA) protocols can really achieve security and fairness. Nevertheless, these qualified MQKA protocols are either too inefficient or too impractical. In this paper, an MQKA protocol is proposed with single photons in travelling mode. Since only one eavesdropping detection is needed in the proposed protocol, the qubit efficiency and measurement efficiency of it are higher than those of the existing ones in theory. Compared with the protocols which make use of the entangled states or multi-particle measurements, the proposed protocol is more feasible with the current technologies. Security and fairness analysis shows that the proposed protocol is not only immune to the attacks from external eavesdroppers, but also free from the attacks from internal betrayers.

Scientific Reports•Nov 6, 2017•33 citations

Efficient multi-party quantum key agreement protocol based on nonorthogonal quantum entangled pairs

Hao Cao, Wenping Ma

Abstract Multi-party quantum key agreement protocols with traveling mode have attracted much attention due to their higher efficiency than protocols with distributing mode. Nevertheless, the structures with traveling mode are generally vulnerable to internal participants, i.e. collusive attack. In order to resist collusive attack, a multi-party quantum key agreement protocol based on nonorthogonal quantum pairs, bell states and their dualities, is proposed. In this paper, we propose the idea of mixed dense encoding on the Pauli operations and the Hadamard operation. The private key sequence of each participant is encoded into a sequence consisting of those single-particle unitary operations which will be performed on the nonorthogonal quantum pairs. In the end, all participants can extract the target common key by comparing the initial states with the final states of the nonorthogonal quantum pairs. The proposed structure has three considerable advantages. Firstly, thanks to the use of nonorthogonal quantum pairs and mixed encoding, the proposed protocol can resist collusive attack from internal participants efficiently. Secondly, the efficiency has been greatly improved. Furthermore, due to the fact that only quantum pairs and simple single-particle unitary transformations are used, the processions of the proposed protocols are simple and can be easily realized in current technology.

Laser Physics Letters•Jul 13, 2018•6 citations

Multiparty quantum key agreement

Song Lin, Xin Zhang, Gongde Guo +2 more

In this paper, we discuss in some detail how multiparty quantum key agreement protocols must be carefully designed and present a collusion attack to illustrate this point. Then, a secure circle-type multiparty quantum key agreement with Bell states is proposed. Bell states are used as the information carriers and transmitted among the participants, who embed their secrets into the traveling particles via certain encoding operations. In this way, all participants simultaneously obtain the same agreement key, i.e., the sum of their secret inputs, at the end of the protocol. Here, quantum state discrimination is utilized to design the encoding operations, which ensures that the proposed protocol is correct and secure against the presented collusion attack. Furthermore, it is shown that the proposed protocol satisfies three conditions of a secure quantum key agreement protocol in theory. In addition, these encoding operations consist of some common single-qubit gates, the Hadamard operator and four Pauli operators, which makes the proposed protocol feasible using current technology.

Physical Review A•Oct 25, 2021•42 citations

Secret sharing with a single d -level quantum system

Armin Tavakoli, Isabelle Herbauts, Marek Żukowski +1 more

We give an example of a wide class of problems for which quantum-information protocols based on multisystem entanglement can be mapped into much simpler ones involving one system. Secret sharing is a cryptographic primitive which plays a central role in various secure multiparty computation tasks and management of keys in cryptography. In secret sharing protocols, a classical message is divided into shares given to recipient parties in such a way that some number of parties need to collaborate in order to reconstruct the message. Quantum protocols for the task commonly rely on multipartite GHZ entanglement. We present a multiparty secret sharing protocol which requires only sequential communication of a single quantum $d$-level system (for any prime $d$). It has huge advantages in scalability and can be realized with state-of-the-art technology.

arXiv:1501.05582•Physical Review A•Sep 21, 2015•142 citations

Multiparty Quantum Key Agreement: Architectures, State-of-the-art, and Open Problems

Malik Mouaji, Saif Al-Kuwari

Multiparty quantum key agreement (MQKA) enables $n \geq 3$ mutually distrustful users to establish a shared secret key through collaborative quantum protocols. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review where we argue that MQKA is best understood as a design space organized along three orthogonal but tightly coupled axes: (1) network architecture, which determines how quantum states flow between participants; (2) quantum resources, which encode the physical degrees of freedom used for implementation; and (3) security model, which defines trust assumptions about devices and infrastructure. Rather than treating MQKA as a linear sequence of isolated protocols, we develop this three-axis perspective to reveal recurrent patterns, sharp trade-offs, and unexplored design spaces. We classify MQKA protocols into structural families, map them to underlying quantum resources, and analyze how different security models shape fairness and collusion resistance. We further identify open challenges in composable security frameworks, network native integration, device-independent implementations, and propose a research roadmap toward hybrid-resource, bosonic-code-encoded, and fairness-aware MQKA suitable for the future quantum internet deployments in the post-NISQ era.

quant-pharXiv:2603.03225•Computer Science Review•Mar 4, 2026•0 citations

Multiparty quantum key agreement protocol secure against collusion attacks

Zhiwei Sun, Xiaoqiang Sun, Ping Wang

The fairness of a secure multi-party quantum key agreement (MQKA) protocol requires that all involved parties are entirely peer entities and can equally influence the outcome of the protocol to establish a shared key wherein no one can decide the shared key alone. However, it is found that parts of the existing MQKA protocols are sensitive to collusion attacks, i.e., some of the dishonest participants can collaborate to predetermine the final key without being detected. In this paper, a multi-party QKA protocol resisting collusion attacks is proposed. Different from previous QKA protocol resisting $N-1$ coconspirators or resisting $1$ coconspirators, we investigate the general circle-type MQKA protocol which can be secure against $t$ dishonest participants' cooperation. Here, $t < N$. We hope the results of the presented paper will be helpful for further research on fair MQKA protocols.

arXiv:1604.01112•Apr 5, 2016•9 citations
Efficient Multiparty Quantum Key Agreement With a Single ddd -Level Quantum System Secure Against Collusive Attack
Recently, multiparty quantum key agreement (MQKA) protocols have gained increasing attention. Several MQKA protocols in the traveling mode have been proposed for higher key generation rates, which, however, are vulnerable to a collusive attack presented by Liu. In this paper, an analysis of Liu's collusive attacks on Cao et al.'s protocol is given, based on which an efficient MQKA protocol that requires only sequential communication of a single d-level quantum system is put forward. Because of the single d-level quantum system, our protocol has huge advantages in scalability and can be realized with the state-of-the-art technology. The scalability means that each additional participant is only required to perform a unitary operator that is comparatively simple, and the complexity of measurements remains independent of the number of participants. Our protocol can also resist Liu's collusive attacks due to the encrypted quantum channel and has an efficiency rate of 1/2N(N is the number of participants) that is much better than those of other quantum key agreement protocols. In addition, by using the proposed encoding method, a wide class of problems for which quantum information protocols based on multisystem entanglement can be mapped into much simpler ones involving only one system.
As a burgeoning branch of quantum cryptography, quantum key agreement is a kind of key establishing processes where the security and fairness of the established common key should be guaranteed simultaneously. However, the difficulty on designing a qualified quantum key agreement protocol increases significantly with the increase of the number of the involved participants. Thus far, only few of the existing multiparty quantum key agreement (MQKA) protocols can really achieve security and fairness. Nevertheless, these qualified MQKA protocols are either too inefficient or too impractical. In this paper, an MQKA protocol is proposed with single photons in travelling mode. Since only one eavesdropping detection is needed in the proposed protocol, the qubit efficiency and measurement efficiency of it are higher than those of the existing ones in theory. Compared with the protocols which make use of the entangled states or multi-particle measurements, the proposed protocol is more feasible with the current technologies. Security and fairness analysis shows that the proposed protocol is not only immune to the attacks from external eavesdroppers, but also free from the attacks from internal betrayers.
Abstract Multi-party quantum key agreement protocols with traveling mode have attracted much attention due to their higher efficiency than protocols with distributing mode. Nevertheless, the structures with traveling mode are generally vulnerable to internal participants, i.e. collusive attack. In order to resist collusive attack, a multi-party quantum key agreement protocol based on nonorthogonal quantum pairs, bell states and their dualities, is proposed. In this paper, we propose the idea of mixed dense encoding on the Pauli operations and the Hadamard operation. The private key sequence of each participant is encoded into a sequence consisting of those single-particle unitary operations which will be performed on the nonorthogonal quantum pairs. In the end, all participants can extract the target common key by comparing the initial states with the final states of the nonorthogonal quantum pairs. The proposed structure has three considerable advantages. Firstly, thanks to the use of nonorthogonal quantum pairs and mixed encoding, the proposed protocol can resist collusive attack from internal participants efficiently. Secondly, the efficiency has been greatly improved. Furthermore, due to the fact that only quantum pairs and simple single-particle unitary transformations are used, the processions of the proposed protocols are simple and can be easily realized in current technology.
In this paper, we discuss in some detail how multiparty quantum key agreement protocols must be carefully designed and present a collusion attack to illustrate this point. Then, a secure circle-type multiparty quantum key agreement with Bell states is proposed. Bell states are used as the information carriers and transmitted among the participants, who embed their secrets into the traveling particles via certain encoding operations. In this way, all participants simultaneously obtain the same agreement key, i.e., the sum of their secret inputs, at the end of the protocol. Here, quantum state discrimination is utilized to design the encoding operations, which ensures that the proposed protocol is correct and secure against the presented collusion attack. Furthermore, it is shown that the proposed protocol satisfies three conditions of a secure quantum key agreement protocol in theory. In addition, these encoding operations consist of some common single-qubit gates, the Hadamard operator and four Pauli operators, which makes the proposed protocol feasible using current technology.
We give an example of a wide class of problems for which quantum-information protocols based on multisystem entanglement can be mapped into much simpler ones involving one system. Secret sharing is a cryptographic primitive which plays a central role in various secure multiparty computation tasks and management of keys in cryptography. In secret sharing protocols, a classical message is divided into shares given to recipient parties in such a way that some number of parties need to collaborate in order to reconstruct the message. Quantum protocols for the task commonly rely on multipartite GHZ entanglement. We present a multiparty secret sharing protocol which requires only sequential communication of a single quantum ddd-level system (for any prime ddd). It has huge advantages in scalability and can be realized with state-of-the-art technology.
Multiparty quantum key agreement (MQKA) enables n≥3n \geq 3n≥3 mutually distrustful users to establish a shared secret key through collaborative quantum protocols. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review where we argue that MQKA is best understood as a design space organized along three orthogonal but tightly coupled axes: (1) network architecture, which determines how quantum states flow between participants; (2) quantum resources, which encode the physical degrees of freedom used for implementation; and (3) security model, which defines trust assumptions about devices and infrastructure. Rather than treating MQKA as a linear sequence of isolated protocols, we develop this three-axis perspective to reveal recurrent patterns, sharp trade-offs, and unexplored design spaces. We classify MQKA protocols into structural families, map them to underlying quantum resources, and analyze how different security models shape fairness and collusion resistance. We further identify open challenges in composable security frameworks, network native integration, device-independent implementations, and propose a research roadmap toward hybrid-resource, bosonic-code-encoded, and fairness-aware MQKA suitable for the future quantum internet deployments in the post-NISQ era.
The fairness of a secure multi-party quantum key agreement (MQKA) protocol requires that all involved parties are entirely peer entities and can equally influence the outcome of the protocol to establish a shared key wherein no one can decide the shared key alone. However, it is found that parts of the existing MQKA protocols are sensitive to collusion attacks, i.e., some of the dishonest participants can collaborate to predetermine the final key without being detected. In this paper, a multi-party QKA protocol resisting collusion attacks is proposed. Different from previous QKA protocol resisting N−1N-1N−1 coconspirators or resisting 111 coconspirators, we investigate the general circle-type MQKA protocol which can be secure against ttt dishonest participants' cooperation. Here, t<Nt < Nt<N. We hope the results of the presented paper will be helpful for further research on fair MQKA protocols.