Sharing secrets using quantum physics

Sascha Gaertner, Christian Kurtsiefer, Mohamed Bourennane +1 more

Secret sharing is a multiparty cryptographic task in which some secret information is split into several pieces which are distributed among the participants such that only an authorized set of participants can reconstruct the original secret. Similar to quantum key distribution, in quantum secret sharing, the secrecy of the shared information relies not on computational assumptions, but on laws of quantum physics. Here, we present an experimental demonstration of four-party quantum secret sharing via the resource of four-photon entanglement.

Rupert Ursin, Richard Hughes

Kiran Adhikari

Quantum information scrambling has emerged as a powerful tool for studying the dynamics of chaotic quantum many-body systems, assessing benchmarking protocols, and even investigating exotic black hole models. During quantum information scrambling, localized quantum information disperses across the entire system, hiding from the observers who can only access part of it. On the other side, we have a fundamental cryptographic primitive called secret-sharing schemes, where a dealer shares a quantum secret with a group of parties, such that any subset of parties above a specific threshold size can reconstruct it. In this paper, we demonstrate that two protocols, Haar scrambling, which serves as a baseline for other scrambling techniques, and quantum secret sharing, are indeed equivalent. The scheme one gets out of this is of a ramp secret-sharing nature rather than a threshold scheme. We expect this because of the inherent randomness present in Haar unitaries. Moreover, by varying the purity of the initial states, we demonstrate that it is possible to obtain all possible types of ramp secret-sharing schemes. Furthermore, utilizing complexity theoretic arguments, we argue that the protocol can be implemented efficiently, i.e., in polynomial time. Finally, we explore potential applications, ranging from security implications for distributed quantum networks to cryptography in the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era, and draw insights for fundamental physics, such as many-body physics and quantum black holes.

김상겸

Nadeem, Muhammad, Noor ul Ain

We propose here a quantum secret sharing scheme that works for both quantum and classical secrets. The proposed scheme is based on both entanglement swapping and teleportation together. It allows sender to encrypt his/her secret and simultaneously distribute decryption information of the encrypted secret among distant parties where decryption shares are nonlocally correlated with each other. Two-fold quantum non-local correlations, generated through entanglement swapping and then teleporting quantum states over swapped maximally entangled pairs, guarantee both authentication and secrecy of the secret from internal as well as external eavesdroppers. For classical secrets, we demonstrate a direct (2,2) quantum secret sharing scheme where neither pre-shared key nor physically secure quantum/classical channel are required. The same scheme turns out to be a (5,5) quantum secret sharing scheme for quantum secrets if sender and receivers have private quantum/classical channels among them.

Ri‐Gui Zhou, Xiaoxue Zhang, Lin-Tao Du