A Lightweight and Efficient Multiparty Semi-Quantum Secret Sharing Protocol Using Entangled States for Sharing Specific Bit

Abstract

Recently, Younes et al. (2024) proposed an efficient multi-party semi-quantum secret sharing (SQSS) scheme that generalizes Tian et al.’s three-party protocol (Tian et al. Quantum Inf. Process. 20(6), 2021) to accommodate multiple participants. This scheme retains the original advantages, such as high qubit efficiency and allowing the secret dealer, Alice, to control the message content. However, (He et al. Quantum Inf. Process 23(2), 2024) identified a vulnerability in Tian et al.’s protocol to the double CNOT attack (DCNA), which also affects the generalized scheme. In response, He et al. proposed an improved protocol to address this issue. Despite these improvements, their protocol is limited to two participants and remains a primarily two-way communication scheme, which does not fully prevent the Trojan horse attack without expensive quantum devices such as photon number splitters (PNS) and wavelength filters (WF). To address these issues, this paper develops a novel multi-party SQSS scheme using the quantum property between Bell states and the Hadamard operation to detect eavesdroppers. This new scheme is secure against the DCNA, intercept-resend attack, and collective attack. It employs a fully one-way communication scheme, entirely preventing the Trojan horse attack without costly quantum devices, aligning with the semi-quantum environment’s original intent. This new protocol also offers better qubit efficiency and allows Alice to share specific secrets.