It is pointed out that two separated quantum channels and three classical authenticated channels are sufficient resources to achieve detectable broadcast.
For asynchronous binary agreement (ABA) with optimal resilience, prior private-setup free protocols (Cachin et al., CCS 2002; Kokoris-Kogias et al., CCS 2020) incur $O({lambda}n^4)$ bits and $O(n^3)$ messages; for asynchronous multi-valued agreement
with external validity (VBA), Abraham et al. [2] very recently gave the first elegant construction with $O(n^3)$ messages, relying on public key infrastructure (PKI), but still costs $O({lambda} n^3 log n)$ bits. We for the first time close the remaining efficiency gap, i.e., reducing their communication to $O({lambda} n^3)$ bits on average. At the core of our design, we give a systematic treatment of reasonably fair common randomness: - We construct a reasonably fair common coin (Canetti and Rabin, STOC 1993) in the asynchronous setting with PKI instead of private setup, using only $O({lambda} n^3)$ bit and constant asynchronous rounds. The common coin protocol ensures that with at least 1/3 probability, all honest parties can output a common bit that is as if uniformly sampled, rendering a more efficient private-setup free ABA with expected $O({lambda} n^3)$ bit communication and constant running time. - More interestingly, we lift our reasonably fair common coin protocol to attain perfect agreement without incurring any extra factor in the asymptotic complexities, resulting in an efficient reasonably fair leader election primitive pluggable in all existing VBA protocols, thus reducing the communication of private-setup free VBA to expected $O({lambda} n^3)$ bits while preserving expected constant running time. - Along the way, we improve an important building block, asynchronous verifiable secret sharing by presenting a private-setup free implementation costing only $O({lambda} n^2)$ bits in the PKI setting. By contrast, prior art having the same complexity (Backes et al., CT-RSA 2013) has to rely on a private setup.
Quantum networks will provide multi-node entanglement over long distances to enable secure communication on a global scale. Traditional quantum communication protocols consume pair-wise entanglement, which is sub-optimal for distributed tasks involvi
ng more than two users. Here we demonstrate quantum conference key agreement, a quantum communication protocol that exploits multi-partite entanglement to efficiently create identical keys between N users with up to N-1 rate advantage in constrained networks. We distribute four-photon Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states generated by high-brightness, telecom photon-pair sources across up to 50 km of fibre, implementing multi-user error correction and privacy amplification on resulting raw keys. Under finite-key analysis, we establish $1.15times10^6$ bits of secure key, which are used to encrypt and securely share an image between the four users in a conference transmission. We have demonstrated a new protocol tailored for multi-node networks leveraging low-noise, long-distance transmission of GHZ states that will pave the way forward for future multiparty quantum information processing applications.
Utilizing the advantage of quantum entanglement swapping, a multi-party quantum key agreement protocol with authentication is proposed. In this protocol, a semi-trusted third party is introduced, who prepares Bell states, and sends one particle to mu
ltiple participants respectively. After that the participants can share a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state by entanglement swapping. Finally, these participants measure the particles in their hands and obtain an agreement key. Here, classical hash function and Hadamard operation are utilized to authenticate the identity of participants. The correlations of GHZ states ensure the security of the proposed protocol. To illustrated it detailly, the security of this protocol against common attacks is analyzed, which shows that the proposed protocol is secure in theory.
Conference key agreement (CKA), or multipartite key distribution, is a cryptographic task where more than two parties wish to establish a common secret key. A composition of bipartite quantum key distribution protocols can accomplish this task. Howev
er, the existence of multipartite quantum correlations allows for new and potentially more efficient protocols, to be applied in future quantum networks. Here, we review the existing quantum CKA protocols based on multipartite entanglement, both in the device-dependent and the device-independent scenario.
Quantum key distribution is one of the most fundamental cryptographic protocols. Quantum walks are important primitives for computing. In this paper we take advantage of the properties of quantum walks to design new secure quantum key distribution sc
hemes. In particular, we introduce a secure quantum key-distribution protocol equipped with verification procedures against full man-in-the-middle attacks. Furthermore, we present a one-way protocol and prove its security. Finally, we propose a semi-quantum variation and prove its robustness against eavesdropping.