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Single-state multi-party semiquantum key agreement protocol based on multi-particle GHZ entangled states

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Abstract

In this paper, we put forward a novel single-state three-party semiquantum key agreement (SQKA) protocol with three-particle GHZ entangled states first. Different with previous quantum key agreement (QKA) protocols, the proposed single-state three-party SQKA protocol can realize the goal that a quantum party and two classical parties who only possess limited quantum capabilities equally contribute to the generation of a shared private key over quantum channels. Detailed security analysis turns out that the proposed single-state three-party SQKA protocol is secure against several famous attacks from an outside eavesdropper, such as the Trojan horse attack, the entangle-measure attack, the measure-resend attack and the intercept-resend attack. Moreover, it can resist the participant attack, which means that the shared private key cannot be determined fully by any nontrivial subset of three parties. The proposed single-state three-party SQKA protocol has the following nice features: (1) it only employs one kind of three-particle GHZ entangled states as initial quantum resource; (2) it does not need pre-shared keys among different parties; (3) it does not need unitary operations or quantum entanglement swapping. Finally, we generalize the proposed single-state three-party SQKA protocol into the case of \(N\)-party by only employing one kind of \(N\)-particle GHZ entangled states as initial quantum resource, which inherits the nice features of its three-party counterpart.

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Data Availability Statement

All data and models generated or used during the study appear in the submitted article.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments that help enhancing the quality of this paper. Funding by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 62071430 and No. 61871347), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Provincial Universities of Zhejiang (Grant No. JRK21002) and Zhejiang Gongshang University, Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of New Network Standards and Technologies (No. 2013E10012) is gratefully acknowledged.

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  1. College of Information & Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, 310018, People’s Republic of China

    Tian-Jie Xu, Ying Chen, Mao-Jie Geng & Tian-Yu Ye

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  1. Tian-Jie Xu
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Correspondence to Tian-Yu Ye.

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Xu, TJ., Chen, Y., Geng, MJ. et al. Single-state multi-party semiquantum key agreement protocol based on multi-particle GHZ entangled states. Quantum Inf Process 21, 266 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-022-03615-5

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