Semi-quantum private comparison and its generalization to the key agreement, summation, and anonymous ranking

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new semi-quantum private comparison protocol using entangled states and single particles, which is extendable to multi-party scenarios and generalizable to other semi-quantum cryptographic tasks, ensuring security without pre-shared keys.

Contribution

The authors propose a novel semi-quantum private comparison protocol based on entangled states, extendable to multiple parties and generalizable to key agreement, summation, and ranking.

Findings

Protocol effectively prevents external and internal attacks.

It can be extended to multi-party scenarios.

It satisfies security and functionality requirements for various semi-quantum tasks.

Abstract

Semi-quantum protocols construct connections between quantum users and ``classical'' users who can only perform certain ``classical'' operations. In this paper, we present a new semi-quantum private comparison protocol based on entangled states and single particles, which does not require pre-shared keys between the ``classical'' users to guarantee the security of their private data. By utilizing multi-particle entangled states and single particles, our protocol can be easily extended to multi-party scenarios to meet the requirements of multiple ``classical'' users who want to compare their private data. The security analysis shows that the protocol can effectively prevent attacks from outside eavesdroppers and adversarial participants. Besides, we generalize the proposed protocol to other semi-quantum protocols such as semi-quantum key agreement, semi-quantum summation, and semi-quantum anonymous ranking protocols. We compare and discuss the proposed protocols with previous similar protocols. The results show that our protocols satisfy the demands of their respective counterparts separately. Therefore, our protocols have a wide range of application scenarios.