Computational Quantum Secret Sharing

TL;DR

This paper introduces computationally-secure quantum secret sharing schemes that are efficient and can have smaller share sizes than the secret, leveraging computational assumptions to overcome limitations of perfect security.

Contribution

It develops a simple compiler to construct polynomial-time QSS schemes for various access structures, enabling smaller shares and extending results beyond perfect security.

Findings

Constructed polynomial-time QSS schemes for many access structures.

Achieved share sizes significantly smaller than the secret.

Improved share size bounds for perfect QSS schemes.

Abstract

Quantum secret sharing (QSS) allows a dealer to distribute a secret quantum state among a set of parties so that certain subsets can reconstruct the secret, while unauthorized subsets obtain no information. While QSS was introduced over twenty years ago, previous works focused only on existence of perfectly secure schemes, and the share size of the known schemes is exponential even for access structures computed by polynomial size monotone circuits. This stands in contrast to the classical case, where efficient computationally-secure schemes have been long known for all access structures in $\mathsf{monotone~P}$, and one can even obtain shares which are much shorter than the secret which is impossible with perfect security. In this work, we initiate the study of computationally-secure QSS and show that computational assumptions help significantly in building QSS schemes. We present a simple compiler and use it to obtain a large variety results: We construct polynomial-time QSS schemes under standard assumptions for a rich class of access structures. This includes many access structures for which previous results in QSS required exponential share size. We also construct QSS schemes for which the size of the shares is significantly smaller than the size of the secret. As in the classical case, this is impossible with perfect security. We also use our compiler to obtain results beyond computational QSS. In the information-theoretic setting, we improve the share size of perfect QSS schemes for a large class of access structures to $1.5^{n+o(n)}$, improving upon best known schemes and matching the best known result for general access structures in the classical case. Finally, we show construct efficient schemes for all access structures in $\mathsf{P}$ and $\mathsf{NP}$ when the quantum secret sharing scheme is given multiple of copies of the secret.