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arXiv:quant-ph/9910067 · Physical Review A

Theory of quantum secret sharing

Daniel Gottesman

Published Mar 16, 2000• 618 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

I present a variety of results on the theory of quantum secret sharing. I show that any mixed state quantum secret sharing scheme can be derived by discarding a share from a pure state scheme, and that the size of each share in a quantum secret sharing scheme must be at least as large as the size of the secret. I show that the only constraints on the existence of quantum secret sharing schemes with general access structures are monotonicity (if a set is authorized, so are larger sets) and the no-cloning theorem. I also discuss some aspects of sharing classical secrets using quantum states. In this situation, the size of each share can sometimes be half the size of the classical secret.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.61.042311

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I present a variety of results on the theory of quantum secret sharing. I show that any mixed state quantum secret sharing scheme can be derived by discarding a share from a pure state scheme, and that the size of each share in a quantum secret sharing scheme must be at least as large as the size of the secret. I show that the only constraints on the existence of quantum secret sharing schemes with general access structures are monotonicity (if a set is authorized, so are larger sets) and the no-cloning theorem. I also discuss some aspects of sharing classical secrets using quantum states. In this situation, the size of each share can sometimes be half the size of the classical secret.
We investigate the concept of quantum secret sharing. In a (k,n)(k,n)(k,n) threshold scheme, a secret quantum state is divided into nnn shares such that any kkk of those shares can be used to reconstruct the secret, but any set of $k\ensuremath{-}1$ or fewer shares contains absolutely no information about the secret. We show that the only constraint on the existence of threshold schemes comes from the quantum ``no-cloning theorem,'' which requires that n<2kn<2kn<2k, and we give efficient constructions of all threshold schemes. We also show that, for $k\ensuremath{\le}n<2k\ensuremath{-}1$, then any (k,n)(k,n)(k,n) threshold scheme must distribute information that is globally in a mixed state.
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 monotone P\mathsf{monotone~P}monotone P, 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)1.5^{n+o(n)}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\mathsf{P}P and NP\mathsf{NP}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.
In this paper we introduce a quantum information theoretical model for quantum secret sharing schemes. We show that quantum information theory provides a unifying framework for the study of these schemes. We prove that the information theoretical requirements for a class of quantum secret sharing schemes reduce to only one requirement (the recoverability condition) as a consequence of the no-cloning principle. We give also a shorter proof of the fact that the size of the shares in a quantum secret sharing scheme must be at least as large as the secret itself.
A restriction on quantum secret sharing (QSS) that comes from the no-cloning theorem is that any pair of authorized sets in an access structure should overlap. From the viewpoint of application, this places an unnatural constraint on secret sharing. We present a generalization, called assisted QSS (AQSS), where access structures without pairwise overlap of authorized sets is permissible, provided some shares are withheld by the share dealer. We show that no more than λ−1λ-1λ−1 withheld shares are required, where λλλ is the minimum number of {\em partially linked classes} among the authorized sets for the QSS. This is useful in QSS schemes where the share dealer is honest by definition and is equivalent to a secret reconstructor. Our result means that such applications of QSS need not be thwarted by the no-cloning theorem.
Secret sharing is ubiquitous throughout cryptography. All possible access structures are classically feasible, and in the case of threshold access structures, the protocols are even very efficient. However, when moving to the quantum setting, the no-cloning theorem shows that many access structures are impossible. In fact, no-cloning exactly characterizes feasibility: for thresholds, quantum secret sharing is possible if and only if the threshold ttt is strictly more than n/2n/2n/2. In this work, we propose a variant of quantum secret sharing (QSS) where two or more identical copies of the input state are provided, but the output is only required to recover one copy. This notion circumvents the simple one-copy no-cloning obstruction, though the natural kkk-copy generalization still gives much milder obstructions. For thresholds using kkk copies, no-cloning implies that QSS is impossible whenever t≤n/(k+1)t\leq n/(k+1)t≤n/(k+1). It is tempting to hypothesize that no-cloning continues to exactly characterize the many-copy case. However, we show that this is not the case. We give positive results showing that multiple copies allow for going slightly beyond the single-copy obstruction: for thresholds, we construct QSS whenever t>(n−k+1)/2t>(n-k+1)/2t>(n−k+1)/2. On the other hand, we give a novel obstruction we call the Clique Path obstruction, which applies to arbitrary access structures. For thresholds, it shows that QSS is impossible whenever t≤(n−1)/kt\leq (n-1)/kt≤(n−1)/k. Our upper and lower bounds exactly match for k=2k=2k=2. Both our results leverage connections to the kkk-colorability of certain graphs derived from the access structure. We leave closing the gap for k≥3k\geq 3k≥3 copies as a fascinating direction for future work. Secret sharing is closely related to error correction, which can also be considered in the many-copy setting. Our results imply similar obstructions for quantum error correction for erasure channels.