Device-independent quantum secret sharing using Mermin-type contextuality
This addresses the challenge of secure secret sharing in quantum networks where devices may be compromised, offering a foundational improvement for quantum cryptography applications.
The authors tackled the problem of ensuring security in quantum secret sharing protocols against untrusted devices and postquantum attackers by developing a new protocol based on Mermin-type contextuality, achieving device-independent security guarantees against nonsignaling attackers.
We present a new quantum secret sharing protocol based on recent advances in Mermin-type contextuality scenarios, which has some security guarantees against postquantum nonsignaling attackers. It is a fundamental assumption of secret sharing protocols that not all players are trusted parties, and that some may collude amongst themselves and with eavesdroppers to break confidentiality. To this extent, quantum secret sharing introduces a new layer of security, enabling eavesdropping detection via entangled states and noncommuting observables. A more thorough security analysis, however, becomes crucial if the protocol relies on untrusted devices for its implementation: for example, it cannot be excluded that some players may collude with the device supplier. In this paper, we put recent developments in Mermin-type contextuality to work in a new quantum secret sharing protocol. The maximal contextuality (aka maximal non-locality, or zero local fraction) demonstrated by the measurement scenarios results in some device-independent security guarantees against nonsignaling attackers -- be they classical, quantum or postquantum.