Hiding the identity of involved participants in the network, known as anonymity, is a crucial issue in some cryptographic applications such as electronic voting systems, auctions, digital signatures, and Byzantine agreements. This paper proposes a new anonymous quantum teleportation protocol based on counterfactual communication where no information-carrying particles pass through the channel. It is achieved by the distribution of a counterfactual entanglement among the participants in the network followed by the establishment of an anonymous entanglement between the sender and the receiver. Afterwards, the sender can anonymously teleport a quantum state to the receiver by utilizing the anonymous entanglement. However, the practicality of the anonymous quantum network mainly calls for two performance measures-robustness against adversarial attacks and noisy environments. Motivated by these demands, firstly, we prove the security of our proposed protocol and show that it achieves both the sender and receiver's anonymity in the presence of active adversaries and untrusted parties. Along with anonymity, we also ensure the correctness of the protocol and the privacy of the teleported qubit. Finally, we analyze the robustness of our proposed protocol under the presence of channel noise and compare its fidelity with those of the conventional protocols. The main advantage of our proposed protocol is that it can provide useful anonymous quantum resources for teleportation under noisy environment with a higher security compared to previous protocols.
Hiding the identity of involved participants in the network, known as anonymity, is a crucial issue in some cryptographic applications such as electronic voting systems, auctions, digital signatures, and Byzantine agreements. This paper proposes a new anonymous quantum teleportation protocol based on counterfactual communication where no information-carrying particles pass through the channel. It is achieved by the distribution of a counterfactual entanglement among the participants in the network followed by the establishment of an anonymous entanglement between the sender and the receiver. Afterwards, the sender can anonymously teleport a quantum state to the receiver by utilizing the anonymous entanglement. However, the practicality of the anonymous quantum network mainly calls for two performance measures-robustness against adversarial attacks and noisy environments. Motivated by these demands, firstly, we prove the security of our proposed protocol and show that it achieves both the sender and receiver's anonymity in the presence of active adversaries and untrusted parties. Along with anonymity, we also ensure the correctness of the protocol and the privacy of the teleported qubit. Finally, we analyze the robustness of our proposed protocol under the presence of channel noise and compare its fidelity with those of the conventional protocols. The main advantage of our proposed protocol is that it can provide useful anonymous quantum resources for teleportation under noisy environment with a higher security compared to previous protocols.
Abstract Anonymous quantum communication (AQC) enables the secure transmission of classical and quantum messages while preserving the anonymity of the sender, receiver, or both. Qudits, quantum states with more advantages than qubits in terms of information transmission rate and eavesdropping detection, offer promising capabilities. In this paper, we propose a verifiable AQC (VAQC) protocol utilizing d-level single-particle states, establishing anonymous entanglement between a public sender and an anonymous receiver. By using quantum teleportation, the public sender can transmit private information to his/her chosen anonymous receiver. The verifiable function of the proposed protocol guarantees the legitimacy of all participants’ identities and verifies the correctness of the anonymous entanglement. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed VAQC protocol satisfies the requirements of correctness, anonymity, and security. The proposed VAQC protocol exhibits extensibility and can be extended to enable private communication between an anonymous sender and an anonymous receiver, as well as anonymous entanglement among multiple participants. This work lays the foundation for practical applications in achieving d-level anonymous entanglement and anonymous transmission of qudits.
While many scenarios of anonymous communication can be solved by various famous classical techniques including mix nets or dining cryptographers (DC), an abundant amount of anonymous tasks remains open. In this paper, we present a solution to one such task. Our protocol serves as a private communication channel for quantum messages while ensuring that both the sender and the receiver stay anonymous in a set of all parties. Our protocol is a continuation of our previous work on anonymous transmission of quantum information. The protocol does not require trusted parties, and is secure against an active adversary. It can also withstand denial of service attacks. The protocol exhibits an advantage of quantum resources over classical because no classical solution is known (in the same security settings). Entanglement swapping technique is used to create "symmetry" in the protocol, which makes it very transparent and easier to analyze. The security analysis we present is heavily based on our previous work on quantum anonymous communication. The task we implement is also a nice illustration of a cryptographic task where two parties in a multi-party protocol can be dishonest at the same time, but are not cooperating.
An efficient information-theoretically secure protocol is proposed. It is built for the anonymous transmission of quantum information. In our proposed scheme, a photon of hybrid entangled pairs is travelling through the participants. After operations performed by the participants, anonymous entanglement transmission channels are generated between the sender and receiver by hybrid entanglement swapping. Our protocol achieves both sender anonymity and receiver anonymity against an active adversary and tolerates any number of corrupt participants. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our protocol has great capacity to teleportate quantum message with fewer resources.
Abstract Anonymous quantum communication (AQC) enables the secure transmission of quantum or classical messages between a sender and a receiver while ensuring the anonymity of their identities. Existing AQC protocols primarily address one-to-one anonymous communication. When there are multiple senders, they must send their messages sequentially to avoid collision problems. In this paper, we propose a multi-participant quantum anonymous communication (MQAC) by employing high-dimensional entangled states. In this protocol, multiple senders establish anonymous entanglement with multiple receivers of their choice and send quantum messages anonymously and simultaneously via quantum teleportation. To propose MQAC, we first present the toolbox we developed, which includes several sub-protocols such as the verification protocol, collision detection protocol, address distribution protocol, and notification protocol. These sub-protocols, which we propose, not only are important parts of MQAC but also serve as the foundation for solving many more complex tasks, such as anonymous commodity transaction. Additionally, the analysis of MQAC demonstrates that neither internal nor external attackers can steal the identities of the communication parties or the transmitted messages by employing any attack. Our work represents an original exploration of anonymous message transmission between multiple senders and receivers in quantum networks.
Abstract Nowadays, identity protection has turned into a fundamental demand for online activities. Currently, the present quantum anonymous communication protocols mostly rely on multi-entanglement. In this paper, we propose an anonymous communication protocol for anonymous sender by using single-particle states. The protocol can be extended to a communication protocol where the sender and receiver are fully anonymous with the message kept secret. In terms of security, our protocol is designed to comply with the technique of collective detection. Compared to the step-by-step detection, collective detection, in which the participants perform detection only once, reduces the complexity of the protocol to some extent. Moreover, we analytically demonstrate the security of the protocol in the face of active attacks. Any active attack employed by an external or internal attacker cannot reveal any useful information about the sender’s identity. Meanwhile, any malicious behavior will be detected by honest participants.
This work presents a simulation-based study of quantum teleportation for secure communication under ideal, noisy, and adversarial conditions using IBM’s Qiskit framework and the Qiskit Aer simulator. The study begins with the verification of Bell-state entanglement to establish quantum correlation, followed by the implementation of a standard three-qubit quantum teleportation protocol. The teleportation system is evaluated across four experimental scenarios: (i) ideal noiseless teleportation, (ii) depolarizing noise environments, (iii) basis disturbance attacks using unauthorized Hadamard operations, and (iv) entanglement injection attacks introducing an external qubit into the communication channel. Each scenario is analyzed using measurement statistics, probability distributions, and state behavior of the receiver qubit. The results demonstrate that quantum teleportation achieves high fidelity under ideal conditions, while environmental noise introduces statistical degradation in state reconstruction. Furthermore, adversarial interference significantly disrupts teleportation performance, with basis disturbance producing near-uniform probability distributions and entanglement injection altering receiver-side measurement statistics. This study highlights both the robustness and vulnerability of quantum communication protocols and emphasizes the importance of noise mitigation, entanglement security, and attack detection mechanisms in future quantum networking systems. The work is entirely simulation-based and implemented using Python and Qiskit.