Narrow Results

In the paper [Mod. Phys. Lett. B 33 (2019) 1950023], Qin et al. proposed a three-party quantum secret sharing scheme based on $d$-dimensional Bell states. We study the security of the proposed scheme and find that it is not secure, that is, one sharer can obtain Alice’s secret messages without the help of the other sharer.

We consider a variant of the BB84 protocol for quantum cryptography, the prototype of tomographically incomplete protocols, where the key is generated by one-way communication rather than the usual two-way communication. Our analysis, backed by numerical evidence, establishes thresholds for eavesdropping attacks on the raw data and on the generated key at quantum bit error rates of 10% and 6.15%, respectively. Both thresholds are lower than the threshold for unconditional security in the standard BB84 protocol.

Utilizing a partially entangled GHZ state, we propose a novel controlled quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) with quantum encryption. Under the supervision and help of the third side, the sender and the receiver can securely share the private quantum entanglement keys used to encrypt and decrypt the secret message. According to the results of checking the eavesdropping on decoy photons, communicators can decide whether the quantum keys are reused in the next round. Not only will eavesdropping inevitably disturb the states of the decoy photons and be detected, but arbitrary transmission errors can also be corrected.

We study eavesdropping in quantum key distribution with the six state protocol, when the signal states are mixed with white noise. This situation may arise either when Alice deliberately adds noise to the signal states before they leave her lab, or in a realistic scenario where Eve cannot replace the noisy quantum channel by a noiseless one. We find Eve's optimal mutual information with Alice, for individual attacks, as a function of the qubit error rate. Our result is that added quantum noise reduces Eve's mutual information more than Bob's.