Quantum secret sharing (QSS), as a quantum extension of classical secret sharing, uses the basic principles of quantum mechanics to share information safely among multiple parties, providing a new paradigm for information security. As a key foundation for secure multiparty quantum communication and distributed quantum computing, QSS has attracted considerable attention since its emergence. Currently, research in this field includes both classical and quantum scenarios, and continuous progress has been made in both theoretical and experimental aspects. This paper first reviews the current development of QSS for classical information. In this regard, significant and parallel progress has been made in both discrete-variable QSS and continuous-variable QSS. The QSS protocols for sharing classical information, from entangled states to single photons and then to coherent light, have been continuously optimized to better utilize available resources and achieve more efficient implementation under current technological conditions. Meanwhile, round-robin, measurement-device-independent, and other protocols have been steadily improving the security of QSS. Next, one will focus on QSS scheme for quantum secrets, which begins with the symmetry of access structures and introduces basic (k, n) threshold protocols, dynamic schemes that support adaptive agent groups, and symmetric quantum information splitting through entanglement. It further introduces hierarchical quantum secret sharing schemes for asymmetric splitting of quantum information. Considering practical laboratory conditions of quantum states as resources, an overall discussion is conducted on quantum secret sharing with graph states. Afterwards, the design of a continuous-variable scheme for quantum secret sharing is outlined, and entanglement state sharing and quantum teleportation between multiple senders and receivers are introduced. Finally, this review discusses and outlines the future development directions of QSS, thereby inspiring readers to further study and explore the relevant subjects.
Quantum secret sharing (QSS), as a quantum extension of classical secret sharing, uses the basic principles of quantum mechanics to share information safely among multiple parties, providing a new paradigm for information security. As a key foundation for secure multiparty quantum communication and distributed quantum computing, QSS has attracted considerable attention since its emergence. Currently, research in this field includes both classical and quantum scenarios, and continuous progress has been made in both theoretical and experimental aspects. This paper first reviews the current development of QSS for classical information. In this regard, significant and parallel progress has been made in both discrete-variable QSS and continuous-variable QSS. The QSS protocols for sharing classical information, from entangled states to single photons and then to coherent light, have been continuously optimized to better utilize available resources and achieve more efficient implementation under current technological conditions. Meanwhile, round-robin, measurement-device-independent, and other protocols have been steadily improving the security of QSS. Next, one will focus on QSS scheme for quantum secrets, which begins with the symmetry of access structures and introduces basic (k, n) threshold protocols, dynamic schemes that support adaptive agent groups, and symmetric quantum information splitting through entanglement. It further introduces hierarchical quantum secret sharing schemes for asymmetric splitting of quantum information. Considering practical laboratory conditions of quantum states as resources, an overall discussion is conducted on quantum secret sharing with graph states. Afterwards, the design of a continuous-variable scheme for quantum secret sharing is outlined, and entanglement state sharing and quantum teleportation between multiple senders and receivers are introduced. Finally, this review discusses and outlines the future development directions of QSS, thereby inspiring readers to further study and explore the relevant subjects.
With the rise of quantum computing, traditional cryptography is facing serious threats. Secret sharing, as an important primitive of cryptography, is also affected. Because secret sharing is widely used in many fields, researchers have started to explore quantum secret sharing (QSS). QSS uses basic principles of quantum mechanics to provide strong security and can protect against both eavesdropping and malicious attacks. However, most existing QSS studies focus on specific situations and lack the flexibility needed for complex multiparty environments. In this work, we propose a general QSS framework that can be applied to different scenarios. We first design a basic [Formula: see text] QSS protocol, and then extend it to support multiparty communication and dynamic changes in participants. Our security analysis shows that the proposed method keeps strong security, uses fewer resources, and works independently without the need for a trusted third party (TP). This protocol offers a unified solution that can meet different application needs and provides a new approach to handling diverse QSS tasks more efficiently.
Quantum secret sharing (QSS) allows a dealer to distribute a secret quantum state among a set of parties so that certain subsets can reconstruct the secret, while unauthorized subsets obtain no information. While QSS was introduced over twenty years ago, previous works focused only on existence of perfectly secure schemes, and the share size of the known schemes is exponential even for access structures computed by polynomial size monotone circuits. This stands in contrast to the classical case, where efficient computationally-secure schemes have been long known for all access structures in monotoneP, and one can even obtain shares which are much shorter than the secret which is impossible with perfect security. In this work, we initiate the study of computationally-secure QSS and show that computational assumptions help significantly in building QSS schemes. We present a simple compiler and use it to obtain a large variety results: We construct polynomial-time QSS schemes under standard assumptions for a rich class of access structures. This includes many access structures for which previous results in QSS required exponential share size. We also construct QSS schemes for which the size of the shares is significantly smaller than the size of the secret. As in the classical case, this is impossible with perfect security. We also use our compiler to obtain results beyond computational QSS. In the information-theoretic setting, we improve the share size of perfect QSS schemes for a large class of access structures to 1.5n+o(n), improving upon best known schemes and matching the best known result for general access structures in the classical case. Finally, we show construct efficient schemes for all access structures in P and NP when the quantum secret sharing scheme is given multiple of copies of the secret.
Quantum secret sharing (QSS) allows a dealer to distribute a secret quantum state among a set of parties in such a way that certain authorized subsets can reconstruct the secret, while unauthorized subsets obtain no information about it. Previous works on QSS for general access structures focused solely on the existence of perfectly secure schemes, and the share size of the known schemes is necessarily exponential even in cases where the access structure is computed by polynomial size monotone circuits. This stands in stark contrast to the classical setting, where polynomial-time computationally-secure secret sharing schemes have been long known for all access structures computed by polynomial-size monotone circuits under standard hardness assumptions, and one can even obtain shares which are much shorter than the secret (which is impossible with perfect security). While QSS was introduced over twenty years ago, previous works only considered information-theoretic privacy. In this work, we initiate the study of computationally-secure QSS and show that computational assumptions help significantly in building QSS schemes, just as in the classical case. We present a simple compiler and use it to obtain a large variety results: We construct polynomial-time computationally-secure QSS schemes under standard hardness assumptions for a rich class of access structures. This includes many access structures for which previous results in QSS necessarily required exponential share size. In fact, we can go even further: We construct QSS schemes for which the size of the quantum shares is significantly smaller than the size of the secret. As in the classical setting, this is impossible with perfect security. We also apply our compiler to obtain results beyond computational QSS. In the information-theoretic setting, we improve the share size of perfect QSS schemes for a large class of n-party access structures to 1.5^{n+o(n)}, improving upon best known schemes and matching the best known result for general access structures in the classical setting. Finally, among other things, we study the class of access structures which can be efficiently implemented when the quantum secret sharing scheme has access to a given number of copies of the secret, including all such functions in 𝖯 and NP.
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.
Abstract With the rapid development of quantum computing, traditional encryption methods face growing security threats. Quantum Secret Sharing (QSS) has emerged as a promising solution, using quantum principles to improve communication security and prevent internal and external attacks. This study proposes a new (t, n) Threshold Quantum Secret Sharing (TQSS) protocol based on single-qubit unitary operations and Lagrange interpolation. The protocol allows secret reconstruction without third-party or dealer assistance and remains efficient even when some participants are absent. To address more complex real-world scenarios, we extend our previously proposed (t, n) TQSS protocol into a Conditional Dynamic TQSS (CDTQSS). This approach uses resource-based share splitting to allow new participants to join without requiring the dealer to redistribute information. However, the protocol is ‘conditional’ because existing participants must take on extra responsibility-they must assist in generating shares for new members and also participate in the secret reconstruction process together with them. The protocol maintains strong security, reduces resource consumption, and offers better flexibility, making it well-suited for practical and dynamic quantum communication needs.
Quantum secret sharing (QSS) is a cryptographic protocol that utilizes fundamental principles of quantum mechanics to securely distribute and reconstruct secret information among multiple participants. Most existing protocols rely on entangled states (such as Bell and GHZ states), but in practical applications. The preparation of entangled state is constrained by a short quantum coherence time, low state fidelity, etc., which makes it difficult to implement entangled resource-dependent QSS protocols. In this work, a novel practical and verifiable multi-party QSS protocol is proposed based on orthogonal product states, which are easier to prepare than entangled states. During the protocol preparation stage, the secret distributor first converts pre-shared classical secret information into the corresponding orthogonal product states according to the encoding rules, and pre-shares a communication key with participants via quantum key distribution (QKD), which is used to hide the initial quantum sequence information through subsequent particle transformation operations. After preparing the orthogonal product states, the distributor reorganizes the particles by position, extracting particles at the same position from each state to form new sequences, shuffling their order, then applying Hadamard operations using a pre-shared key, inserting decoy particles, and sending the sequences to the participants. After receiving it, participants conduct eavesdropping detection, use the same key for the inverse transformations, retain one particle from each sequence, and sequentially pass the remaining particles until the last participant receives a complete set, triggering state verification with the arbiter distributor. If the verification is successful, the particles will be returned to the first participant and the return stage will follow the same procedure. Only after both the transmission and return stage verifications have passed, will the distributor reveal the initial particle positions, allowing participants to collaboratively reconstruct the secret. In the protocol, the secret distributor acts as an arbitrator to verify the particle state information together with participants at designated points (the end of the transmission stage and the end of the return stage) in order to determine whether the particle-state information is error-free during transmission. If the verification fails at either stage, the protocol will be terminated immediately. Meanwhile, considering that the number of participants may change during the execution of the protocol, a dynamic scheme for personnel changes is designed to ensure the flexibility of the protocol. Through the analysis of possible internal and external attacks, It can be proven that our protocol can effectively resist the existing common attack. Using Qiskit simulation experiments, the core quantum procedures of the protocol can be successfully modeled. The experimental results provide strong computational validation of the theoretical feasibility of the protocol.