Single-state multi-party semiquantum key agreement protocol based on multi-particle GHZ entangled states

Abstract

In this paper, we put forward a novel single-state three-party semiquantum key agreement (SQKA) protocol with three-particle GHZ entangled states first. Different with previous quantum key agreement (QKA) protocols, the proposed single-state three-party SQKA protocol can realize the goal that a quantum party and two classical parties who only possess limited quantum capabilities equally contribute to the generation of a shared private key over quantum channels. Detailed security analysis turns out that the proposed single-state three-party SQKA protocol is secure against several famous attacks from an outside eavesdropper, such as the Trojan horse attack, the entangle-measure attack, the measure-resend attack and the intercept-resend attack. Moreover, it can resist the participant attack, which means that the shared private key cannot be determined fully by any nontrivial subset of three parties. The proposed single-state three-party SQKA protocol has the following nice features: (1) it only employs one kind of three-particle GHZ entangled states as initial quantum resource; (2) it does not need pre-shared keys among different parties; (3) it does not need unitary operations or quantum entanglement swapping. Finally, we generalize the proposed single-state three-party SQKA protocol into the case of $$N$$ -party by only employing one kind of $$N$$ -particle GHZ entangled states as initial quantum resource, which inherits the nice features of its three-party counterpart.