Efficient hyperentanglement-based quantum secret sharing protocol

Abstract

Quantum secret sharing (QSS) is a typical multipartite cryptographic primitive, which is an important part of quantum communication network. Existing QSS protocols generally require basis selection and matching, which would increase the quantum resource consumption and classical communication round, and also face weak random security vulnerabilities. We propose an efficient hyperentanglement-based QSS protocol without the basis selection, in which the dealer and partners share a polarization-momentum hyperentangled Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state and encode keys in the polarization degree of freedom (DOF). The dealer decodes the transmitted keys relying on the nonlocal hyperentanglement-assisted polarization GHZ state analysis. Our QSS protocol is unconditionally secure in theory. We develop simulation method to estimate its performance in practical environment. Compared with the QSS based on the GHZ state, our protocol has several advantages. First, it does not require basis selection and can completely distinguish eight polarization GHZ states, which can improve the utilization rate of entanglement resources to 100$\%$ and increase the key generation rate by an order of magnitude. Second, it only requires one round of classical communication, and thus can reduce key generation time by 69.4$\%$. Third, it can eliminate the weak random security vulnerabilities associated with the basis selection. Finally, our protocol only uses linear optical elements, which makes it practically feasible. Our QSS protocol has potential application in future quantum communication network.