A verifiable framework of entanglement-free quantum secret sharing with information-theoretical security

Abstract

Quantum secret sharing (QSS) schemes without entanglement have huge advantages in scalability and are easier to realize as they only require sequential communications of a single quantum system. However, these schemes often come with drawbacks such as exact ($n, n$) structure, security flaws and absences of effective cheating detections. To address these problems, we propose a verifiable framework by utilizing entanglement-free states to construct ($t, n$)-QSS schemes. Our work is the heuristic step towards information-theoretical security in entanglement-free QSS, and it sheds light on how to establish effective verification mechanism against cheating. As a result, the proposed framework has a significant importance in constructing QSS schemes for versatile applications in quantum networks due to its intrinsic scalability, flexibility and information theoretical security.