Sequential quantum secret sharing in noisy environments

Abstract

Sequential Quantum Secret Sharing schemes (QSS) do not use entangled states for secret sharing, rather they rely on sequential operations of the players on a single state which is circulated between the players. In order to check the viability of these schemes under imperfect operations and noise in the channels, we consider one such scheme in detail and show that under moderate conditions it is still possible to extract viable secure shared keys in this scheme. Although we specifically consider only one type of sequential scheme and three different noise models, our method is fairly general to be applied to other QSS schemes and noise models as well.