We show that the criticism of a recent Comment by Gao et al. on the insecurity of the quantum secret sharing protocol [proposed in S. Bagherinezhad and V. Karimipour, Phys. Rev. A 67, 044302 (2003)] is based on a misconception about the meaning of security and hence is invalid.
In the preceding Comment [Jian-Zhong Du, Su-Juan Qin, Qiao-Yan Wen, and Fu-Chen Zhu, Phys. Rev. A 74, 016301 (2006)], it has been shown that in a quantum secret sharing protocol proposed in [S. Bagherinezhad and V. Karimipour, Phys. Rev. A 67, 044302 (2003)], one of the receivers can cheat by splitting the entanglement of the carrier and intercepting the secret, without being detected. In this reply we show that a simple modification of the protocol prevents the receivers from this kind of cheating.
In the preceding Comment it has been claimed that an entangled-based quantum key distribution protocol proposed by Zhang, Li, and Gao [Phys. Rev. A 64, 024302 (2001)] and its generalization to d-level systems by Karimipour, Bahraminasab, and Bagherinezhad [Phys. Rev. A 65, 052331 (2002)] are insecure against an attack devised by the authors of the Comment. We invalidate the arguments of the Comment and show that the protocols are still secure.