Experimental Demonstration of Sequential Multiparty Quantum Secret Sharing and Quantum Conference Key Agreement

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates practical, scalable quantum secret sharing and conference key agreement protocols over long distances, with experimental validation showing secure multi-party communication capabilities for future quantum networks.

Contribution

The authors introduce three new (k, n) threshold QSS protocols that are practical, secure, and require minimal hardware modifications, and they experimentally validate these over significant fiber distances.

Findings

Achieved secure key rates of 0.0061 and 7.14×10^-4 bits per pulse over 25 km and 55 km fibers.

Protocols are secure against eavesdroppers and dishonest players, and support QCKA with minimal modifications.

Experimental demonstration confirms the feasibility of scalable multi-party quantum communication.

Abstract

Quantum secret sharing (QSS) and quantum conference key agreement (QCKA) provide efficient encryption approaches for realizing multi-party secure communication, which are essential components of future quantum networks. We present three practical, scalable, verifiable (k, n) threshold QSS protocols that are secure against eavesdroppers and dishonest players. The proposed QSS protocols eliminate the need for each player preparing the laser source and laser phase locking of the overall players. The dealer can implement the parameter evaluation and get the secret information of each player without the cooperation from other players. We consider the practical security of the proposed QSS systems with Trojan-horse attack, untrusted source intensity fluctuating and untrusted noisy sources. Our QSS systems are versatile, they can support the QCKA protocol by only modifying the classic post-processing and requiring no changes to the underlying hardware architecture. We experimentally implement the QSS and QCKA protocol with five parties over 25 km (55 km) single mode fibers, and achieve a key rate of 0.0061 (7.14*10^-4) bits per pulse. Our work paves the way for the practical applications of future QSS and QCKA.