Multi-party quantum key agreement with five-qubit brown states

• DOI: 10.1007/s11128-018-1871-4
• Publication Date: 2018-03-19T07:48:22Z
• Authors: Tao Cai; Min Jiang; Gang Cao
• Keywords: Shared secret

In this paper, we propose a multi-party quantum key agreement protocol with five-qubit brown states and single-qubit measurements. Our multi-party protocol ensures each participant to contribute equally to the agreement key. Each party performs three single-qubit unitary operations on three qubits of each brown state. Finally, by measuring brown states and decoding the measurement results, all participants can negotiate a shared secret key without classical bits exchange between them. With the analysis of security, our protocol demonstrates that it can resist against both outsider and participant attacks. Compared with other schemes, it also possesses a higher information efficiency. In terms of physical operation, it requires single-qubit measurements only which weakens the hardware requirements of participant and has a better operating flexibility.