A secure crossing two qubits protocol based on quantum homomorphic encryption

Abstract

Abstract In order to solve the information leakage caused by dishonest intermediate nodes in quantum network coding, we apply quantum homomorphic encryption to the butterfly network, and propose a secure protocol for crossing two qubits. Firstly, in the communication process between two senders and the first intermediate node, two senders encrypt their measured particles and send them to the first intermediate node for encoding. If two intermediate nodes are dishonest and know the encryption rules between two senders and two receivers, or there is an external eavesdropper, none of them can recover the transmitted qubits of two senders from the encrypted transmitted particles. In this way, our protocol can transmit two qubits safely and crossly in the butterfly network. Secondly, by analyzing the internal participant attack and the external eavesdropper attack launched by dishonest intermediate nodes and an external eavesdropper respectively, it is confirmed that our protocol is secure. Finally, the experimental simulation results based on the Qiskit framework prove that our protocol is feasible.