There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

We analyzed the security of the secure direct communication protocol based on the secret transmitting order of particles recently proposed by Zhu, Xia, Fan, and Zhang[Phys. Rev. A 73, 022338 (2006)] and found that this scheme is insecure if an eavesdropper, say Eve, wants to steal the secret message with Trojan horse attack strategies. The vital loophole in this scheme is that the two authorized users check the security of their quantum channel only once. Eve can insert another spy photon, an invisible photon, or a delay one in each photon which the sender Alice sends to the receiver Bob, and capture the spy photon when it returns from Bob to Alice. After the authorized users check the security, Eve can obtain the secret message according to the information about the transmitting order published by Bob. Finally, we present a possible improvement of this protocol.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0612016.pdf

Improving the security of secure direct communication based on the secret transmitting order of particles

Photonic quantum technologies represent a promising platform for several applications, ranging from long-distance communications to the simulation of complex phenomena. Indeed, the advantages offered by single photons do make them the candidate of choice for carrying quantum information in a broad variety of areas with a versatile approach. Furthermore, recent technological advances are now enabling first concrete applications of photonic quantum information processing. The goal of this manuscript is to provide the reader with a comprehensive review of the state of the art in this active field, with a due balance between theoretical, experimental and technological results. When more convenient, we will present significant achievements in tables or in schematic figures, in order to convey a global perspective of the several horizons that fall under the name of photonic quantum information.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6633/aad5b2/pdf

Photonic quantum information processing: a review

The participant attack is the most serious threat for quantum secret-sharing protocols. We present a method to analyze the security of quantum secret-sharing protocols against this kind of attack taking the scheme of Hillery, Buzek, and Berthiaume (HBB) [Phys. Rev. A 59 1829 (1999)] as an example. By distinguishing between two mixed states, we derive the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a dishonest participant can attain all the information without introducing any error, which shows that the HBB protocol is insecure against dishonest participants. It is easy to verify that the attack scheme of Karlsson, Koashi, and Imoto [Phys. Rev. A 59, 162 (1999)] is a special example of our results. To demonstrate our results further, we construct an explicit attack scheme according to the necessary and sufficient conditions. Our work completes the security analysis of the HBB protocol, and the method presented may be useful for the analysis of other similar protocols.

Cryptanalysis of the Hillery-Bužek-Berthiaume quantum secret-sharing protocol

We analyzed the security of the multiparty quantum secret sharing (MQSS) protocol recently proposed by Zhang, Li, and Man [Phys. Rev. A 71, 044301 (2005)] and found that this protocol is secure for any other eavesdropper except for the agent Bob who prepares the quantum signals as he can attack the quantum communication with a Trojan horse. That is, Bob replaces the single-photon signal with a multiphoton one and the other agent Charlie cannot find this cheating as she does not measure the photons before they run back from the boss Alice, which reveals that this MQSS protocol is not secure for Bob. Finally, we present a possible improvement of the MQSS protocol security with two single-photon measurements and four unitary operations.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0506194.pdf

Improving the security of multiparty quantum secret sharing against Trojan horse attack

A scheme for multiparty quantum state sharing of an arbitrary two-particle state is presented with Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pairs. Any one of the $N$ agents has the access to regenerate the original state with two local unitary operations if he collaborates with the other agents, say the controllers. Moreover, each of the controllers is required to take only a product measurement ${\ensuremath{\sigma}}_{x}\ensuremath{\bigotimes}{\ensuremath{\sigma}}_{x}$ on his two particles, which makes this scheme more convenient for the agents in the applications on a network than others. As all the quantum source can be used to carry the useful information, the intrinsic efficiency of qubits approaches the maximal value. With a new notation for the multipartite entanglement, the sender need only publish two bits of classical information for each measurement, which reduces the information exchanged largely.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0504158.pdf

Multiparty quantum state sharing of an arbitrary two-particle state with Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pairs

We present two efficient quantum key distribution schemes over two different collective-noise channels. The accepted hypothesis of collective noise is that photons travel inside a time window small compared to the variation of noise. Noiseless subspaces are made up of two Bell states and the spatial degree of freedom is introduced to form two nonorthogonal bases. Although these protocols resort to entangled states for encoding the key bit, the receiver is only required to perform single-particle product measurements and there is no basis mismatch. Moreover, the detection is passive as the receiver does not switch his measurements between two conjugate measurement bases to get the key.

Xi-Han Li

Papers

Improving the security of multiparty quantum secret sharing against Trojan horse attack

Multiparty quantum state sharing of an arbitrary two-particle state with Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pairs

Improving the security of secure direct communication based on the secret transmitting order of particles

Efficient quantum key distribution over a collective noise channel

Efficient quantum key distribution over a collective noise channel (6 pages)