Theory of Communication Efficient Quantum Secret Sharing

TL;DR

This paper advances quantum secret sharing by developing universal communication-efficient schemes that minimize quantum communication costs for any number of parties involved in recovery.

Contribution

It introduces universal CE-QTS schemes, provides a construction framework, and proves their optimality through lower bounds and information-theoretic analysis.

Findings

Universal CE-QTS schemes reduce communication costs for all d≥k

Frameworks based on ramp secret sharing and Staircase codes are proposed

Lower bounds on communication complexity are established and matched by constructions

Abstract

A $((k,n))$ quantum threshold secret sharing (QTS) scheme is a quantum cryptographic protocol for sharing a quantum secret among $n$ parties such that the secret can be recovered by any $k$ or more parties while $k-1$ or fewer parties have no information about the secret. Despite extensive research on these schemes, there has been very little study on optimizing the quantum communication cost during recovery. Recently, we initiated the study of communication efficient quantum threshold secret sharing (CE-QTS) schemes. These schemes reduce the communication complexity in QTS schemes by accessing $d\geq k$ parties for recovery; here $d$ is fixed ahead of encoding the secret. In contrast to the standard QTS schemes which require $k$ qudits for recovering each qudit in the secret, these schemes have a lower communication cost of $\frac{d}{d-k+1}$ for $d>k$. In this paper, we further develop the theory of communication efficient quantum threshold schemes. Here, we propose universal CE-QTS schemes which reduce the communication cost for all $d\geq k$ simultaneously. We provide a framework based on ramp quantum secret sharing to construct CE-QTS and universal CE-QTS schemes. We give another construction for universal CE-QTS schemes based on Staircase codes. We derived a lower bound on communication complexity and show that our constructions are optimal. Finally, an information theoretic model is developed to analyse CE-QTS schemes and the lower bound on communication complexity is proved again using this model.