Kun-Fei Yu’s research while affiliated with National Cheng Kung University and other places

This paper proposes a multi-party semi-quantum secret sharing (MSQSS) protocol which allows a quantum party (manager) to share a secret among several classical parties (agents) based on GHZ-like states. By utilizing the special properties of GHZ-like states, the proposed scheme can easily detect outside eavesdropping attacks and has the highest qubit efficiency among the existing MSQSS protocols. Then, we illustrate an efficient way to convert the proposed MSQSS protocol into a multi-party semi-quantum key distribution (MSQKD) protocol. The proposed approach is even useful to convert all the existing measure–resend type of semi-quantum secret sharing protocols into semi-quantum key distribution protocols.

Yu et al. have proposed the first authenticated semi-quantum key distribution (ASQKD) without using an authenticated classical channel. This study further proposes two advanced ASQKD protocols. Compared to Yu et al.’s schemes, the proposed protocols ensure better qubit efficiency and require fewer pre-shared keys. Security analyses show that the proposed ASQKD protocols also can be secure against several well-known outside eavesdropper’s attacks.

It is essential for a secure quantum key agreement protocol (QKA) to possess the fairness property in which all protocol participants contribute their information evenly for the construction of a shared secret key and none of them has the advantage to control (manipulate) even a bit of the key. This study shows that most of the existing QKAs cannot prevent a malicious participant from manipulating the shared secret key. To solve this problem, a model which describes the way to design a QKA with the fairness property is proposed. Based on the model, an example QKA is presented. Security analyses show that the proposed QKA is effective to resist not only outsider's eavesdropping attack but also insider's key manipulation.

This study presents the first authenticated semi-quantum key distribution (ASQKD) protocols without using authenticated classical channels. By pre-sharing a master secret key between two communicants, a sender with advanced quantum devices can transmit a working key to a receiver, who can merely perform classical operations. The idea of ASQKD enables establishment of a key hierarchy in security systems that also eases the key management problem. The proposed protocols are free from several well-known attacks