A verifiable quantum key agreement protocol based on six-qubit cluster states

TL;DR

This paper introduces a secure, verifiable multi-party quantum key agreement protocol utilizing six-qubit cluster states, ensuring shared key correctness, resistance to participant attacks, and security against external threats.

Contribution

It presents a novel protocol with a verifiable distributor and homomorphic hashing to enhance security and fairness in quantum key agreement.

Findings

Resists participant and external attacks

Ensures correctness and simultaneity of shared keys

Uses six-qubit cluster states for secure key agreement

Abstract

Quantum key agreement requires all participants to recover the shared key together, so it is crucial to resist the participant attack. In this paper, we propose a verifiable multi-party quantum key agreement protocol based on the six-qubit cluster states. A verifiable distributor who preserves some subsequences of the six-qubit cluster states is introduced into this protocol, thus the participants can not obtain the shared key in advance. Besides, the correctness and simultaneity of the shared key are guaranteed by the trusted design combiner and homomorphic hash function. Furthermore, the security analysis shows that the new protocol can resist the external and internal attacks.