A verifiable quantum key agreement protocol based on six-qubit cluster states

Abstract

With the emergence of the multi-party quantum key agreement, the participant attack has attracted great attention, since it is a destructive attack which is easier to obtain the effective information than the external attack. In this paper, a new multi-party quantum key agreement protocol with six-qubit cluster states which has the verification function is put forward. At first, a verifiable distributor is introduced to distribute the remaining information of six-qubit cluster states to any two adjacent participants after preserving a part. Next, once the participants verify the correctness of the received information with the properties of six-qubit cluster states under the X-basis, the cluster states are used as the quantum resource to perform the X operation in the participant operation phase. Finally, it can not only verify the correctness of the recovered shared key, but also guarantee its simultaneity through the trusted design combiner and homomorphic hash function. Furthermore, the security analysis shows that the new protocol can resist the external and internal attacks. And it's proved that our protocol is meaningful through the comparation analysis.