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Modern Physics Letters B

Quantum communication scheme with freely selectable users

Tianqi Dou, Hongwei Liu, Jipeng Wang, Zhenhua Li, Wenxiu Qu, Shunyu Yang, Fen Zhou, Zhongqi Sun, Yanxin Han, Yuqing Huang, Haiqiang Ma

Published Feb 18, 2021• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Quantum communication plays an important role in quantum information science due to its unconditional security. In practical implementations, the users of each communication vary with the transmitted information, and hence not all users are required to participate in each communication round. Therefore, improving the flexibility and efficiency of the actual communication process is highly demanded. Here, we propose a theoretical quantum communication scheme that realizes secret key distribution for both the two-party quantum key distribution (QKD) and multi-party quantum secret sharing (QSS) modes. The sender, Alice, can freely select one or more users to share keys among all users, and nonactive users will not participate in the process of secret key sharing. Numerical simulations show the superiority of the proposed scheme in transmission distance and secure key rate. Consequently, the proposed scheme is valuable for secure quantum communication network scenarios.

DOI
10.1142/s0217984921501566

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Quantum communication plays an important role in quantum information science due to its unconditional security. In practical implementations, the users of each communication vary with the transmitted information, and hence not all users are required to participate in each communication round. Therefore, improving the flexibility and efficiency of the actual communication process is highly demanded. Here, we propose a theoretical quantum communication scheme that realizes secret key distribution for both the two-party quantum key distribution (QKD) and multi-party quantum secret sharing (QSS) modes. The sender, Alice, can freely select one or more users to share keys among all users, and nonactive users will not participate in the process of secret key sharing. Numerical simulations show the superiority of the proposed scheme in transmission distance and secure key rate. Consequently, the proposed scheme is valuable for secure quantum communication network scenarios.
The need for secrecy and security is essential in communication. Secret sharing is a conventional protocol to distribute a secret message to a group of parties, who cannot access it individually but need to cooperate in order to decode it. While several variants of this protocol have been investigated, including realizations using quantum systems, the security of quantum secret sharing schemes against eavesdroppers and dishonest participants remained unproven. Here we establish an unconditional security proof for continuous variable entanglement-based quantum secret sharing schemes, in the limit of asymptotic keys and for an arbitrary number of players, by utilizing ideas from the recently developed one-sided device-independent approach to quantum key distribution. We demonstrate the practical feasibility of our scheme, which can be implemented by Gaussian states and homodyne measurements, with no need for ideal single-photon sources or quantum memories. Our results establish quantum secret sharing as a viable and practically relevant primitive for quantum communication technologies.
Quantum key distribution, which allows two distant parties to share an unconditionally secure cryptographic key, promises to play an important role in the future of communication. For this reason such technique has attracted many theoretical and experimental efforts, thus becoming one of the most prominent quantum technologies of the last decades. The security of the key relies on quantum mechanics and therefore requires the users to be capable of performing quantum operations, such as state preparation or measurements in multiple bases. A natural question is whether and to what extent these requirements can be relaxed and the quantum capabilities of the users reduced. Here we demonstrate a novel quantum key distribution scheme, where users are fully classical. In our protocol, the quantum operations are performed by an untrusted third party acting as a server, which gives the users access to a superimposed single photon, and the key exchange is achieved via interaction-free measurements on the shared state. We also provide a full security proof of the protocol by computing the secret key rate in the realistic scenario of finite-resources, as well as practical experimental conditions of imperfect photon source and detectors. Our approach deepens the understanding of the fundamental principles underlying quantum key distribution and, at the same time, opens up new interesting possibilities for quantum cryptography networks
Semi-quantum key distribution (SQKD) is an important research issue which allows one quantum participant equipped with advanced quantum devices to distribute a shared secret key securely with one classical user who has restricted capabilities. In this paper, we propose a SQKD protocol which allows one quantum user to distribute two different private secret keys to two classical users respectively at the same time. Alice distributes two particle sequences from Bell states to Bob and Charlie respectively. Once the particles have been processed and returned, Alice can simultaneously detect reflected particles by Bob and Charlie based on Bell-state measurement and generate two different raw keys. To enable more participants in sharing keys, this protocol can be extended to the m + 1 party communication scheme by employing m-particle GHZ state. In large-scale communication networks, this extended model significantly reduces the complexity of communication compared to the traditional SQKD scheme. Security analyses show that the presented protocol is free from several general attacks, such as the entangle-measure attack, the modification attack, the double CNOT attack, and so on.
Semi-quantum cryptography communication stipulates that the quantum user has complete quantum capabilities, and the classical user has limited quantum capabilities, only being able to perform the following operations: (1) measuring and preparing qubits with a Z basis and (2) returning qubits without any processing. Secret sharing requires participants to work together to obtain complete secret information, which ensures the security of the secret information. In the semi-quantum secret sharing (SQSS) protocol, the quantum user Alice divides the secret information into two parts and gives them to two classical participants. Only when they cooperate can they obtain Alice's original secret information. The quantum states with multiple degrees of freedom (DoFs) are defined as hyper-entangled states. Based on the hyper-entangled single-photon states, an efficient SQSS protocol is proposed. The security analysis proves that the protocol can effectively resist well-known attacks. Compared with the existing protocols, this protocol uses hyper-entangled states to expand the channel capacity. The transmission efficiency is 100% higher than that of single-degree-of-freedom (DoF) single-photon states, providing an innovative scheme for the design of the SQSS protocol in quantum communication networks. This research also provides a theoretical basis for the practical application of semi-quantum cryptography communication.
Quantum secret sharing is a fundamental technique in quantum cryptography. However, in practical quantum networks, it still faces several bottlenecks, such as high quantum communication cost and low transmission efficiency. To reduce the communication cost, ramp quantum secret sharing schemes have been proposed in existing studies. Nevertheless, intermediate sets in such schemes may leak partial information about the secret. To address this problem, this paper presents a method for detecting intermediate sets. Based on this method, we further propose a communication-efficient perfect quantum secret sharing scheme with eavesdropping detection capability.We analyze the communication cost under different numbers of participating parties and determine the range of participants that minimizes the reconstruction communication cost. The results verify the communication efficiency and security of the proposed scheme.
In this letter, we proposed a novel scheme for the realization of scalable and flexible semi-quantum secret sharing between a boss and multiple dynamic agent groups. In our scheme, the boss Alice can not only distribute her secret messages to multiple users, but also can dynamically adjust the number of users and user groups based on the actual situation. Furthermore, security analysis demonstrates that our protocol is secure against both external attack and participant attack. Compared with previous schemes, our protocol is more flexible and practical. In addition, since our protocol involving only single qubit measurement that greatly weakens the hardware requirements of each user.