Improvement of Gao et al.’s semi-quantum secret sharing protocol

Abstract

Recently, Yin and Fu (Int. J. Theor. Phys. 55(9), 4027–4035 (2016)) pointed out that Xie et al.’s semi-quantum secret sharing (SQSS) protocol (Int. J. Theor. Phys. 54(10), 3819–3824 (2015)) suffers from the intercept-resend attack from a dishonest party, and suggested an improved protocol accordingly. Later, Gao et al. (Int. J. Theor. Phys. 56(8), 2512–2520 (2017)) pointed out that Yin and Fu’s analysis on the intercept-resend attack from a dishonest party is incorrect. Moreover, they also pointed out that Yin and Fu’s improved protocol does not satisfy the condition of semi-quantum, and proposed an improved protocol. This paper is devoted to putting forward an improved version for Gao et al.’s protocol. Compared with Gao et al.’s protocol, the improved version has higher quantum efficiency and less classical communication cost.