Abstract This paper integrates dynamic participant management, verifiable secret reconstruction, and fault tolerance against noise and adversarial attacks. By leveraging graph states for scalable entanglement and a quantum error-correcting code (\([\![n,1,d]\!]\)), the protocol enables secure sharing of classical and quantum secrets among n participants, requiring a threshold k for reconstruction. A hybrid verification mechanism---combining randomly interleaved trap qubits and post-quantum hash functions---detects malicious behavior with probability \(1 - \left(\frac{3}{4}\right)^m\) for m traps, while dynamic graph-state reconfiguration permits seamless participant addition/removal. Formal security proofs demonstrate information-theoretic secrecy against collusion ( t < k participants), adaptive coherent attacks, and revoked dishonest participants, alongside tolerance for \(t = \lfloor (d-1)/2 \rfloor\) errors. The protocol’s composable security is established via the Universal Composability framework, and simulations on IBM Quantum achieve greater than 95\% secret recovery fidelity under depolarizing noise ((p = 0.01). Key innovations include linear resource scaling, stabilizer-based error correction, and compatibility with post-quantum cryptography. This work bridges theoretical security with practical feasibility, offering a robust framework for quantum-secure systems in dynamic, noisy environments.
Abstract This paper integrates dynamic participant management, verifiable secret reconstruction, and fault tolerance against noise and adversarial attacks. By leveraging graph states for scalable entanglement and a quantum error-correcting code (([![n,1,d]!])), the protocol enables secure sharing of classical and quantum secrets among n participants, requiring a threshold k for reconstruction. A hybrid verification mechanism---combining randomly interleaved trap qubits and post-quantum hash functions---detects malicious behavior with probability (1 - \left(\frac{3}{4}\right)^m) for m traps, while dynamic graph-state reconfiguration permits seamless participant addition/removal. Formal security proofs demonstrate information-theoretic secrecy against collusion ( t < k participants), adaptive coherent attacks, and revoked dishonest participants, alongside tolerance for (t = \lfloor (d-1)/2 \rfloor) errors. The protocol’s composable security is established via the Universal Composability framework, and simulations on IBM Quantum achieve greater than 95% secret recovery fidelity under depolarizing noise ((p = 0.01). Key innovations include linear resource scaling, stabilizer-based error correction, and compatibility with post-quantum cryptography. This work bridges theoretical security with practical feasibility, offering a robust framework for quantum-secure systems in dynamic, noisy environments.
Abstract In this paper, we introduce an authenticable quantum secret sharing protocol by utilizing unitary diagonal operator and quantum SUM gate. Here, dealer distributes quantum and classical information simultaneously to participants. The cheat-detection mechanism is designed to identify and expose any malicious actions by participants. During this process, each subsequent participant can detect and recognize deceptive behaviour from dishonest members. To ensure that only legitimate participants are involved in the protocol, we introduce an identity authentication mechanism, where the dealer and each participant share a pair of secret PIN sequences. The implementation of the proposed scheme on the IBM quantum platform (restricted to d = 2) demonstrates its operational correctness and feasibility. Noise-aware simulations under realistic NISQ conditions show that, although performance degrades with increasing noise, the correct outcome remains dominant, indicating robust behaviour in the presence of decoherence, gate errors, and measurement imperfections. Additionally, a complementary analysis is performed under different noise environments, including dit-flip noise, d-phase-flip noise, and depolarizing noise. The obtained results indicate that the efficiency of the proposed protocol decreases with increasing channel noise parameter, with distinct performance variations observed across all the noise models. Furthermore, this work takes into account the situation in which at least t out of the n participants can use the Lagrange interpolation to recover the secret classical and quantum information. The security analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol is resilient to intercept-resend, collusion, entangle-measure, forgery and denial attacks.
Abstract Quantum secret sharing (QSS) is a fundamental primitive in quantum cryptography, enabling secure distribution of sensitive information among multiple parties. However, existing protocols often suffer from vulnerabilities such as collusion attacks, uneven share distribution, and protocol failure due to random basis selection. In this paper, we propose a novel QSS protocol that integrates hash-based measurement basis derivation with decoy photon-enhanced eavesdropping detection. Our scheme ensures fair and deterministic secret reconstruction while eliminating the need for entangled states or complex quantum operations. We rigorously analyze the protocol's correctness, security against both internal and external adversaries, and efficiency in terms of qubit usage, transmission delay, and computational overhead. Notably, our protocol supports dynamic participant management, allowing agents to join or leave securely without re-executing the entire protocol. Comparative analysis demonstrates that our approach outperforms existing QSS protocols across multiple performance metrics. This work bridges the gap between theoretical robustness and practical deployment, offering a scalable and resilient solution for post-quantum secure communication.
Abstract Quantum secret sharing (QSS) is a fundamental primitive in quantum cryptography, enabling secure distribution of sensitive information among multiple parties. However, existing protocols often suffer from vulnerabilities such as collusion attacks, uneven share distribution, and protocol failure due to random basis selection. This paper proposes a novel QSS protocol that integrates hash-based measurement basis derivation with decoy photon-enhanced eavesdropping detection. The scheme ensures fair and deterministic secret reconstruction while eliminating the need for entangled states or complex quantum operations, thereby significantly reducing the quantum operational complexity and hardware requirements. The protocol’s correctness, security against both internal and external adversaries, and efficiency in terms of qubit usage, transmission delay, and computational overhead are rigorously analyzed. Notably, the protocol supports dynamic participant management, allowing agents to join or leave securely without re-executing the entire protocol. Comparative analysis demonstrates that the proposed approach outperforms existing QSS protocols across multiple performance metrics. By minimizing quantum resource requirements-such as the elimination of entanglement generation and complex quantum operations-our protocol enhances compatibility with near-term quantum networks, thus facilitating the transition from theoretical QSS models to experimentally feasible implementations.
A verifiable quantum secret sharing protocol using quantum walks on a lattice is proposed in this paper. The protocol utilizes generalized Bell states as the initial quantum resource, integrating the quantum walk evolution operator U with the global shift operator Gab to facilitate joint encrypted transmission among multiple participants. A bidirectional identity authentication mechanism based on hash functions is introduced to ensure the legitimacy of all communication parties, which effectively resists impersonation attacks. Random decoy particles are randomly prepared in either the Zd or Xd basis and inserted into the transmission sequence, enabling real-time eavesdropping detection on the quantum channel. In the secret reconstruction phase, a public verification mechanism is designed to allow participants to verify the correctness of the recovered secret and identify internal dishonest behaviors. Security analysis demonstrates that the protocol achieves information-theoretic security, resisting typical external attacks such as intercept-resend, measure-resend, and entangle-measure attacks, as well as collusion attacks from dishonest internal participants. Compared with existing quantum-walk-based secret sharing schemes, the proposed protocol maintains high qubit efficiency while supporting both identity authentication and public verifiability, thus possessing stronger practicality and security.
Abstract Quantum secret sharing (QSS) plays a crucial role in quantum cryptography as a privacy preserving scheme. Designing an efficient QSS protocol requires addressing three key challenges: 1) dynamic agent membership (handling agents joining or leaving during execution), 2) adversarial resilience (ensuring robustness against dishonest agents), and 3) practical optimization (improving computational and communication efficiency while minimizing implementation cost). In this paper, a verifiable dynamic threshold QSS (VDQSS) protocol with authentication capability is proposed. The protocol employs single particles for both authentication and share distribution, combining homogeneous linear recursion (HLR) with mutually unbiased bases (MUBs) to reconstruct multiple secrets. This approach significantly enhances security while reducing protocol complexity. The correctness and practicality of the protocol are validated through experimental simulations. Analytical results demonstrate its robustness against common attacks, providing reliable security guarantees for quantum communications. Compared to existing QSS protocols, the protocol offers enhanced simplicity and practical applicability.
Abstract Quantum secret sharing (QSS) has significant potential to improve secure communications. However, conventional QSS protocols, typically based on (n, n) or (t, n) threshold structures, require participants to possess symmetric authority, which is often impractical. To address scenarios with participants holding asymmetric privileges, we propose an innovative QSS scheme that realizes a hypergraph structure. This enables secret recovery only for authorized sets with the appropriate privileges. In detail, a specialized hypergraph structure is investigated to construct d-dimensional multipartite entangled states. Using these states, we develop an authenticated QSS protocol that enables secret recovery by authorized sets. Security analysis confirms the protocol’s resilience against common attacks, including intercept-resend, entangle-measure, dishonest participant and Trojan horse attacks. We further characterize the distinct impacts of dit-flip, phase-flip, dit-phase-flip, and depolarizing noise channels on quantum state transmission within the protocol. This characterization demonstrates that dynamically adapting error probability threshold according to prevailing noise conditions is essential to maintain security. Compared with existing protocols, our scheme improves quantum efficiency and reduces the number of unitary operations, which enhances its experimental feasibility.