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Efficient single-state multi-party quantum key agreement

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Abstract

In this paper, we proposed an efficient single-state three-party quantum key agreement (QKA) protocol. We proved that the protocol can resist potential outside attacks and inside attacks, and we generalized the efficient single-state three-party QKA scheme into the case of the N-party by substituting N-particle entangled state for three-particle entangled state as the resource quantum states. Compared with the previous QKA protocols, our scheme contains the good features of previous schemes, i.e., using one kind of maximally entangled states as the quantum resource, no requirements for pre-shared key between different participants, and no requirements for executing any unitary operations or quantum entanglement swapping. Furthermore, our scheme has significant improvements in terms of the times of quantum states transmission, the consumed qubits, and the qubit efficiency. In particular, as the number of participants increases, the number of qubits required by our scheme increases linearly rather than exponentially.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 62101197; China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under Grant No. 2021M691148; the Key Research & Development Plan of Hubei Province of China under Grant No. 2021BAA038; the Project of Science, Technology and Innovation Commission of Shenzhen Municipality of China under Grant Nos. JCYJ20210324120002006 and JSGG20210802153009028, the 2021 Industrial Technology Basic Public Service Platform Project of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of PRC under Grant No. 2021-0171-1-1; the excellent youthful project Scientific research of Hunan Provincial Department of Education: 20B491; “4310” cultivation program of clinical medicine research of Hengyang Medical School, University of South China [HengYiFa (2021) No. 1-2-7].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hubei Key Laboratory of Distributed System Security, Hubei Engineering Research Center on Big Data Security, School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Hao Yang, Songfeng Lu & Qing Zhou

  2. Shenzhen Huazhong University of Science and Technology Research Institute, Shenzhen, 518063, China

    Songfeng Lu

  3. The NanHua Affiliated Hospital, Clinical Research Institute, Hengyang Medical School, University of South China, Hengyang, 421001, China

    Mu Wang

  4. Industrial Internet Research Institute, Wuhan Huazhong Numerical Control Co., Ltd., Wuhan, 430074, China

    Bingyan Feng

  5. Wuhan Zhuoer Information Technology Co., Ltd., Wuhan, 430040, China

    Xianjing Zhou

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  1. Hao Yang
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  2. Songfeng Lu
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  4. Mu Wang
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Correspondence to Songfeng Lu.

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Yang, H., Lu, S., Zhou, Q. et al. Efficient single-state multi-party quantum key agreement. Quantum Inf Process 23, 150 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-024-04350-9

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