Experimental Efficient Source-Independent Quantum Secret Sharing against Coherent Attacks

TL;DR

This paper experimentally demonstrates a resource-efficient source-independent quantum secret sharing protocol using entangled photon pairs, achieving high secure key rates across multiple users and showing scalability for large quantum networks.

Contribution

The work provides the first experimental implementation of a resource-efficient SI QSS protocol with high-fidelity entangled photons, demonstrating scalable secure key rates for multiuser quantum networks.

Findings

Achieved secure key rates of 21.18, 4.69, and 1.71 kbps for three users under different losses.

Demonstrated secure key rates of 6.97, 6.46, and 5.88 kbps for three-, four-, and five-user scenarios.

Showed that the key rate is independent of the number of users, indicating scalability.

Abstract

Source-independent quantum secret sharing (SI QSS), while essential for secure multiuser cryptographic operations in quantum networks, faces significant implementation challenges stemming from the inherent complexity of generating and distributing multipartite entangled states. Recently, a resource-efficient SI QSS protocol utilizing entangled photon pairs combined with a postmatching method has been proposed to address this limitation. In this Letter, we report an experimental demonstration of this protocol using high-fidelity polarization-entangled photon pairs in a star topology. For a three-user network, we obtain secure key rates of 21.18, 4.69, and 1.71 kbps under single-user channel losses of 7.6, 10.9, and 12.9 dB respectively. Furthermore, under conditions of equal channel loss per user, we achieve secure key rates of 6.97, 6.46, and 5.88 kbps for three-, four-, and five-user scenarios respectively. These results demonstrate the advantageous independence of the key rate from the number of users. Our work paves the way for large-scale deployment of SI QSS in multiuser quantum networks.