基于Cluster态的可验证多方量子密钥协商方案

基于四量子比特Cluster态,提出一种可验证多方量子密钥协商方案.方案允许每次由两个参与者利用自己的子密钥分别在每个四量子比特Cluster态的两个粒子上执行X运算,并对转换后的Cluster态执行延迟测量,这保证了每个参与者对协商密钥的贡献相等.提出的方案使用相互无偏基粒子作为诱饵粒子,并且利用对称二元多项式的一对函数值对这些诱饵粒子执行酉运算,不仅可以进行窃听检验,而且还能进行参与者之间的身份验证.本方案适用于任意大于2的参与者人数.安全性分析表明,提出的方案能够抵抗外部攻击及参与者攻击.与现有的多方密钥协商方案相比,该方案不仅在诱饵粒子的使用上有优势,同时具有较高的量子比特效率.     

Novel multiparty quantum key agreement protocol with GHZ states

In many circumstances, a shared key is needed to realize secure communication. Based on quantum mechanics principles, quantum key agreement (QKA) is a good method to establish a shared key by every party’s fair participation. In this paper, we propose a novel three-party QKA protocol, which is designed by using Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) states. To realize the protocol, the distributor of the GHZ states needs only one quantum communication with the other two parties, respectively, and everyone performs single-particle measurements simply. Then, we extend the three-party QKA protocol to arbitrary multiparty situation. At last, we discuss the security and fairness of the multiparty protocol. It shows that the new scheme is secure and fair to every participant.     

Two-party quantum key agreement protocols under collective noise channel

Recently, quantum communication has become a very popular research field. The quantum key agreement (QKA) plays an important role in the field of quantum communication, based on its unconditional security in terms of theory. Among all kinds of QKA protocols, QKA protocols resisting collective noise are widely being studied. In this paper, we propose improved two-party QKA protocols resisting collective noise and present a feasible plan for information reconciliation. Our protocols’ qubit efficiency has achieved 26.67%, which is the best among all the two-party QKA protocols against collective noise, thus showing that our protocol can improve the transmission efficiency of quantum key agreement.     

Two-party quantum key agreement with four-qubit cluster states

Based on four-qubit cluster states, we present a two-party quantum key agreement (QKA) scheme using unitary operations. In this scheme, two participants perform the unitary operation on the different photon of the same cluster state, which guarantees that each party contributes equally to the agreement key. By measuring each cluster state and decoding, these two participants can generate a four-bit classical key without the exchange of classical bits between them. Compared with other existed two-party QKA protocols, our scheme is efficient. Security analysis shows that our protocol is secure against both participant and outsider attack.     

Multiparty quantum key agreement with single particles

Two conditions must be satisfied in a secure quantum key agreement (QKA) protocol: (1) outside eavesdroppers cannot gain the generated key without introducing any error; (2) the generated key cannot be determined by any non-trivial subset of the participants. That is, a secure QKA protocol can not only prevent the outside attackers from stealing the key, but also resist the attack from inside participants, i.e. some dishonest participants determine the key alone by illegal means. How to resist participant attack is an aporia in the design of QKA protocols, especially the multi-party ones. In this paper we present the first secure multiparty QKA protocol against both outside and participant attacks. Further more, we have proved its security in detail.     

Quantum key agreement with EPR pairs and single-particle measurements

In this paper, we present a QKA protocol with the block transmission of EPR pairs. There are several advantages in this protocol. First, this protocol can guarantee both the fairness and security of the shared key. Second, this protocol has a high qubit efficiency since there is no need to consume any quantum state except the ones used for establishing the shared key and detecting eavesdropping. In addition, this protocol uses EPR pairs as the quantum information carriers and further utilizes single-particle measurements as the main operations. Therefore, it is more feasible than the protocols that need to perform Bell measurements. Especially, we also introduce a method for sharing EPR pairs between two participants over collective-dephasing channel and collective-rotation channel, respectively. This method is meaningful since sharing EPR pairs between two participants is an important work in many quantum cryptographic protocols, especially in the protocols over non-ideal channels. By utilizing this method, the QKA protocols, which are based on EPR pairs, can be immune to these kinds of collective noise.     

Protocols of quantum key agreement solely using Bell states and Bell measurement

Two protocols of quantum key agreement (QKA) that solely use Bell state and Bell measurement are proposed. The first protocol of QKA proposed here is designed for two-party QKA, whereas the second protocol is designed for multi-party QKA. The proposed protocols are also generalized to implement QKA using a set of multi-partite entangled states (e.g., 4-qubit cluster state and \(\Omega \) state). Security of these protocols arises from the monogamy of entanglement. This is in contrast to the existing protocols of QKA where security arises from the use of non-orthogonal state (non-commutativity principle). Further, it is shown that all the quantum systems that are useful for implementation of quantum dialogue and most of the protocols of secure direct quantum communication can be modified to implement protocols of QKA.     

Cryptanalysis of a multi-party quantum key agreement protocol with single particles

Recently, Sun et al. (Quantum Inf Process 12:3411–3420, 2013) presented an efficient multi-party quantum key agreement (QKA) protocol by employing single particles and unitary operations. The aim of this protocol is to fairly and securely negotiate a secret session key among \(N\) parties with a high qubit efficiency. In addition, the authors claimed that no participant can learn anything more than his/her prescribed output in this protocol, i.e., the sub-secret keys of the participants can be kept secret during the protocol. However, here we point out that the sub-secret of a participant in Sun et al.’s protocol can be eavesdropped by the two participants next to him/her. Moreover, a certain number of dishonest participants can fully determine the final shared key in this protocol. Finally, we discuss the factors that should be considered when designing a really fair and secure QKA protocol.     

Cryptographic one-way function based on boson sampling

Quantum Information Processing - Based on four-qubit cluster states, we present a new multi-party quantum key agreement (QKA) protocol. The proposed protocol makes full use of four-qubit cluster...     

Multi-party quantum key agreement protocol secure against collusion attacks

The fairness of a secure multi-party quantum key agreement (MQKA) protocol requires that all involved parties are entirely peer entities and can equally influence the outcome of the protocol to establish a shared key wherein no one can decide the shared key alone. However, it is found that parts of the existing MQKA protocols are sensitive to collusion attacks, i.e., some of the dishonest participants can collaborate to predetermine the final key without being detected. In this paper, a multi-party QKA protocol resisting collusion attacks is proposed. Different from previous QKA protocol resisting \(N-1\) coconspirators or resisting 1 coconspirators, we investigate the general circle-type MQKA protocol which can be secure against t dishonest participants’ cooperation. Here, \(t < N\). We hope the results of the presented paper will be helpful for further research on fair MQKA protocols.     

Efficient multiparty quantum key agreement protocol based on commutative encryption

A secure multiparty quantum key agreement protocol using single-qubit states is proposed. The agreement key is computed by performing exclusive-OR operation on all the participants’ secret keys. Based on the commutative property of the commutative encryption, the exclusive-OR operation can be performed on the plaintext in the encrypted state without decrypting it. Thus, it not only protects the final shared key, but also reduces the complexity of the computation. The efficiency of the proposed protocol, compared with previous multiparty QKA protocols, is also improved. In the presented protocol, entanglement states, joint measurement and even the unitary operations are not needed, and only rotation operations and single-state measurement are required, which are easier to be realized with current technology.     

Efficient quantum dialogue using entangled states and entanglement swapping without information leakage

We propose a novel quantum dialogue protocol by using the generalized Bell states and entanglement swapping. In the protocol, a sequence of ordered two-qutrit entangled states acts as quantum information channel for exchanging secret messages directly and simultaneously. Besides, a secret key string is shared between the communicants to overcome information leakage. Different from those previous information leakage-resistant quantum dialogue protocols, the particles, composed of one of each pair of entangled states, are transmitted only one time in the proposed protocol. Security analysis shows that our protocol can overcome information leakage and resist several well-known attacks. Moreover, the efficiency of our scheme is acceptable.     

Two-step orthogonal-state-based protocol of quantum secure direct communication with the help of order-rearrangement technique

The Goldenberg–Vaidman (GV) protocol for quantum key distribution uses orthogonal encoding states of a particle. Its security arises because operations accessible to Eve are insufficient to distinguish the two states encoding the secret bit. We propose a two-particle cryptographic protocol for quantum secure direct communication, wherein orthogonal states encode the secret, and security arises from restricting Eve from accessing any two-particle operations. However, there is a non-trivial difference between the two cases. While the encoding states are perfectly indistinguishable in GV, they are partially distinguishable in the bipartite case, leading to a qualitatively different kind of information-versus-disturbance trade-off and also options for Eve in the two cases.     

The general theory of three-party quantum secret sharing protocols over phase-damping channels

The general theory of three-party QSS protocols with the noisy quantum channels is discussed. When the particles are transmitted through the noisy quantum channels, the initial pure three-qubit tripartite entangled states would be changed into mixed states. We analyze the security of QSS protocols with the different kinds of three-qubit tripartite entangled states under phase-damping channels and figure out, for different kinds of initial states, the successful probabilities that Alice’s secret can be recovered by legal agents are different. Comparing with one recent QSS protocol based on GHZ states, our scheme is secure, and has a little smaller key rate than that of the recent protocol.     

异构家庭网络中融合量子信息技术的安全通信协议

随着量子信息技术与家庭网络技术日益紧密结合,采用量子密钥确保家庭网络的通信安全已经成为大势所趋.针对目前数字家庭通信网络的安全日益复杂和多样化的问题,提出了异构家庭网络中融合量子信息技术的安全通信协议,智能终端设备、家庭网关、业务管理平台内的服务器共享量子GHZ 态,根据GHZ 三重态的内在特性,从而实现业务管理平台内的服务器对智能终端设备的合法性访问和数据处理.该协议利用现有手段可以实现.     

Multi-cast key distribution: scalable,dynamic and provably secure construction

In this paper, we propose a two-round dynamic multi-cast key distribution (DMKD) protocol under the star topology with a central authentication server. Users can share a common session key without revealing any information of the session key to the server and can join/leave to/from the group at any time even after establishing the session key. Our protocol is scalable because communication and computation costs of each user are independent from the number of users. Also, our protocol is still secure if either private key or session-specific randomness of a user is exposed. Furthermore, time-based backward secrecy is guaranteed by renewing the session key for every time period even if the session key is exposed. We introduce the first formal security definition for DMKD under the star topology in order to capture such strong exposure resilience and time-based backward secrecy. We prove that our protocol is secure in our security model in the standard model.     

Security of a single-state semi-quantum key distribution protocol

Semi-quantum key distribution protocols are allowed to set up a secure secret key between two users. Compared with their full quantum counterparts, one of the two users is restricted to perform some “classical” or “semi-quantum” operations, which potentially makes them easily realizable by using less quantum resource. However, the semi-quantum key distribution protocols mainly rely on a two-way quantum channel. The eavesdropper has two opportunities to intercept the quantum states transmitted in the quantum communication stage. It may allow the eavesdropper to get more information and make the security analysis more complicated. In the past ten years, many semi-quantum key distribution protocols have been proposed and proved to be robust. However, there are few works concerning their unconditional security. It is doubted that how secure the semi-quantum ones are and how much noise they can tolerate to establish a secure secret key. In this paper, we prove the unconditional security of a single-state semi-quantum key distribution protocol proposed by Zou et al. (Phys Rev A 79:052312, 2009). We present a complete proof from information theory aspect by deriving a lower bound of the protocol’s key rate in the asymptotic scenario. Using this bound, we figure out an error threshold value such that for all error rates that are less than this threshold value, the secure secret key can be established between the legitimate users definitely. Otherwise, the users should abort the protocol. We make an illustration of the protocol under the circumstance that the reverse quantum channel is a depolarizing one with parameter q. Additionally, we compare the error threshold value with some full quantum protocols and several existing semi-quantum ones whose unconditional security proofs have been provided recently.     

Multi-party quantum key agreement with five-qubit brown states

In this paper, we propose a multi-party quantum key agreement protocol with five-qubit brown states and single-qubit measurements. Our multi-party protocol ensures each participant to contribute equally to the agreement key. Each party performs three single-qubit unitary operations on three qubits of each brown state. Finally, by measuring brown states and decoding the measurement results, all participants can negotiate a shared secret key without classical bits exchange between them. With the analysis of security, our protocol demonstrates that it can resist against both outsider and participant attacks. Compared with other schemes, it also possesses a higher information efficiency. In terms of physical operation, it requires single-qubit measurements only which weakens the hardware requirements of participant and has a better operating flexibility.     

Optimal remote preparation of arbitrary multi-qubit real-parameter states via two-qubit entangled states

In this paper, we present an efficient scheme for remote state preparation of arbitrary n-qubit states with real coefficients. Quantum channel is composed of n maximally two-qubit entangled states, and several appropriate mutually orthogonal bases including the real parameters of prepared states are delicately constructed without the introduction of auxiliary particles. It is noted that the successful probability is 100% by using our proposal under the condition that the parameters of prepared states are all real. Compared to general states, the probability of our protocol is improved at the cost of the information reduction in the transmitted state.     

Orthogonal-state-based deterministic secure quantum communication without actual transmission of the message qubits

Recently, an orthogonal-state-based protocol of direct quantum communication without actual transmission of particles is proposed by Salih et al. (Phys Rev Lett 110:170502, 2013) using chained quantum Zeno effect. The counterfactual condition (claim) of Salih et al. is weakened here to the extent that transmission of particles is allowed, but transmission of the message qubits (the qubits on which the secret information is encoded) is not allowed. Remaining within this weaker (non-counterfactual) condition, an orthogonal-state-based protocol of deterministic secure quantum communication is proposed using entanglement swapping, where actual transmission of the message qubits is not required. Further, it is shown that there exists a large class of quantum states that can be used to implement the proposed protocol. The security of the proposed protocol originates from monogamy of entanglement. As the protocol can be implemented without using conjugate coding, its security is independent of non-commutativity.