AN EFFICIENT MULTIPARTY QUANTUM KEY DISTRIBUTION SCHEME

Abstract

We propose a quantum key distribution (QKD) scheme in which four parties can simultaneously share a secret key via optical device. The participants divide the communication into two modes, namely, detecting mode and message mode. Taking advantage of controlled secret short key technology, the participants together can achieve the detecting mode or the message mode by switching between their two sets of optical devices. In the detecting mode, the key distributer Alice utilizes a single-photon state resource and two beam splitters and the other three participants Bob, Charlie and Dick use first-type devices to detect the superposition of vacuum and single-particle states. Hence, any eavesdropping can be found by using a variant of Bell's inequality. In the message mode, Alice uses a two-photon Bell-state resource and two polarization beam splitters instead of the single-particle state resource and beam splitters used in the detecting mode and the other three participants use second-type devices to detect photons. In this case, the secret key can be successfully distributed from Alice to the other three ones. Moreover, the present four-party QKD scheme can be generalized to a 2n-party QKD scheme by using n-photon Greenberg–Horne–Zeilinger.