With the rapid expansion of the digital economy and smart grids, secure and fair pricing mechanisms have become essential for data trading. However, existing approaches remain vulnerable to quantum attacks, exhibit poor scalability in multi-party settings, and demand high resource consumption. To overcome these limitations, we introduce, for the first time, a Quantum Secure Joint Pricing (QSJP) mechanism, which supports multi-party joint pricing and ensures fair and privacy-preserving pricing in power data trading while protecting participants’ sensitive information and incentivizing their active participation. At the core of QSJP, we propose a novel Secure Multi-Party Quantum Scalar Product (SMQSP) protocol, supported by a Secure Multi-Party Quantum Summation (SMQS) scheme that enables privacy-preserving and efficient aggregation of intermediate results. The SMQSP protocol leverages Fourier entangled states and GHZ states to achieve scalable and efficient scalar product computation with polynomial complexity. We further validate the correctness and practicality of the proposed framework through circuit simulations on IBM Qiskit.
With the rapid expansion of the digital economy and smart grids, secure and fair pricing mechanisms have become essential for data trading. However, existing approaches remain vulnerable to quantum attacks, exhibit poor scalability in multi-party settings, and demand high resource consumption. To overcome these limitations, we introduce, for the first time, a Quantum Secure Joint Pricing (QSJP) mechanism, which supports multi-party joint pricing and ensures fair and privacy-preserving pricing in power data trading while protecting participants’ sensitive information and incentivizing their active participation. At the core of QSJP, we propose a novel Secure Multi-Party Quantum Scalar Product (SMQSP) protocol, supported by a Secure Multi-Party Quantum Summation (SMQS) scheme that enables privacy-preserving and efficient aggregation of intermediate results. The SMQSP protocol leverages Fourier entangled states and GHZ states to achieve scalable and efficient scalar product computation with polynomial complexity. We further validate the correctness and practicality of the proposed framework through circuit simulations on IBM Qiskit.
Abstract With the rapid development of distributed collaborative computing, privacy leakage risks in multi-source data joint analysis are increasing, and classical secure scalar product (SSP) protocols are vulnerable to quantum attacks. Existing quantum secure scalar product schemes mostly rely on complex quantum resources or third parties, only support two-party computation, and have poor scalability. To address these issues, this paper proposes a secure multi-party quantum scalar product protocol based on single-photon resources without a third party. The protocol adopts a two-layer architectural design, integrating pairwise secure product operation and privacy-preserving aggregation mechanism. It realizes result blinding via data splitting and reconstruction to fully guarantee data confidentiality. By adopting ring interaction structure and lightweight secure computing modes, it completes collaborative computation of multi-party private data and effectively prevents information leakage in interactive processes. Performance analysis shows that the protocol requires no more than single-photon and single-particle measurements, with complexity within a reasonable range, making it feasible with current quantum technology. This protocol provides an efficient and secure primitive for multi-party privacy-preserving collaborative computing in quantum-resistant scenarios.
Secure two-party scalar product (S2SP) is a promising research area within secure multiparty computation (SMC), which can solve a range of SMC problems, such as intrusion detection, data analysis, and geometric computations. However, existing quantum S2SP protocols are not efficient enough, and the complexity is usually close to exponential level. In this paper, a novel secure two-party quantum scalar product (S2QSP) protocol based on Fourier entangled states is proposed to achieve higher efficiency. Firstly, the definition of unconditional security under malicious models is given. And then, an honesty verification method called Entanglement Bondage is proposed, which is used in conjunction with the modular summation gate to resist malicious attacks. The property of Fourierentangled states is used to calculate the scalar product with polynomial complexity. The unconditional security of our protocol is proved, which guarantees the privacy of all parties. In addition, we design a privacy-preserving quantum matrix multiplication protocol based on S2QSP protocol. By transforming matrix multiplication into a series of scalar product processes, the product of two private matrices is calculated without revealing any privacy. Finally, we show our protocol’s feasibility in IBM Qiskit simulator.
With the rapid advancement of information technology, data sharing has become increasingly accessible, leading to a heightened need for robust personal data protection. One important application in privacy-preserving computing is the aggregation of information when collaboratively establishing AI models through public distributed networks. To counter the threat posed by quantum computing to encrypted data, various quantum private summation (QPS) protocols have been proposed thus far. However, some of these existing protocols operate solely under modulo 2, while other approaches for modulo d often rely on impractically high-dimensional qudits. Therefore, this study proposes an innovative multiparty QPS method that balances participant data sharing and privacy without requiring high-dimensional photons. The proposed QPS protocol enables participants to contribute aggregated information to third parties without disclosing individual data. A security analysis further demonstrates that the proposed QPS effectively counters common eavesdropping attacks, ensuring reliable protection of personal data.
Secure multi-party computation has been playing a fundamental role in terms of classical cryptography. Quantum homomorphic encryption (QHE) could compute the encrypted data without decryption. At present, most protocols use a semi-honest third party (TP) to protect participants’ secrets. We use a quantum homomorphic encryption scheme instead of TP to protect the privacy of parties. Based on quantum homomorphic encryption, a secure multi-party quantum summation scheme is proposed in which N participants can delegate a server with strong quantum computing power to assist computation. By delegating the computation and key update processes to a server and a semi-honest key center, participants encrypt their private information data using Pauli operators to get the sum. Besides, the server can design and optimize the summation lines itself, and the correct results can be obtained even if the secret information is negative. The correctness analysis showed that the participants could correctly obtain the results of the calculation. The security analysis proves the scheme is resistant to both outside attack and participant’s attack, and is secure against collusive attack by up to N-2 participants. From the theoretical point of view, our protocol can extend to other secure multi-party computing problems.
The advent of quantum computing presents a paradigm shift in modern cybersecurity, threatening the foundations of classical cryptographic systems such as RSA, ECC, and Diffie–Hellman key exchange. Quantum algorithms like Shor’s and Grover’s can efficiently break these schemes, rendering existing encryption mechanisms vulnerable and obsolete. This growing risk necessitates the development of quantum-resilient or post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) solutions that can safeguard data and computation in the era of quantum networks. Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC), a cornerstone of privacy-preserving computation, enables multiple entities to jointly compute a function over their private inputs without revealing them. However, its traditional security assumptions are also undermined by quantum threats. This research aims to explore and evaluate quantum-safe cryptographic protocols for integrating PQC into SMPC frameworks, thereby ensuring both confidentiality and correctness even in the presence of quantum-capable adversaries. The study focuses on lattice-based, hash-based, and code-based cryptographic primitives, analyzing their resilience, efficiency, and scalability when applied to distributed systems. A comparative framework is proposed to assess the performance and security trade-offs of different post-quantum SMPC implementations under realistic network conditions. The findings are expected to contribute to the design of a new class of cryptographic protocols capable of resisting quantum attacks, supporting the secure functioning of next-generation networks, and guiding policymakers and technologists toward practical post-quantum standardization. Ultimately, this research strengthens the bridge between theoretical cryptography and real-world cybersecurity readiness in the post-quantum era.
A sealed-bid auction is an essential tool for trading commodities in modern society. However, the non-winning bidders in previously proposed sealed-bid auction schemes lack privacy protection. In this paper, we define a sealed-bid auction with strong privacy protection, which can protect the privacy of all non-winning bidders. In order to fulfil the task, we first present a quantum secret sharing protocol and a secure quantum summation protocol and then design their corresponding quantum circuits, where the security of the latter is guaranteed by the former, while the former is information-theoretically secure. We further present a quantum seal-bid auction (QSA) scheme with strong privacy protection based on the designed quantum protocols. In our QSA scheme, each bidder first encodes a private vector by his private bid and public agreement information, and then all bidders jointly compute the summations of their respective private vectors without a trusted third party. Finally, we verify the correctness and the feasibility of the proposed QSA scheme by circuit simulations in IBM Qiskit.