Multi-qubit hierarchical quantum state sharing with authentication

To effectively guarantee the authorized communication between the participants and further enhance the information transmission capacity of the link, a multi-qubit hierarchical quantum state sharing protocol with authentication is proposed. First, a type of four-qubit cluster state is generated as the quantum resource, which can be used for the whole process of subsequent authentication and secret sharing, thus eliminating the need to prepare additional entanglement resources. Then, all the agents simply perform Z-basis measurement operations, and the sender can verify that the agents are legitimate, allowing authentication to be conveniently implemented. Finally, depending on the nature of the selected cluster states, the ability of the agent to recover the secret state is asymmetric, and the target quantum state to be shared can be an arbitrary n-qubit state. Furthermore, we validate the correctness of the sharing process for a particular two-qubit state utilizing the IBM simulator and check the security of the proposed protocol against some quantum attacks.