Continuous-Variable Quantum Secret Sharing in Fast-Fluctuating Channels

Abstract

Recently, several continuous-variable quantum secret sharing (CV-QSS) protocols were proposed, while most of them are limited to the fiber channel systems with a relatively stable transmissivity. However, by means of complex channels, the transmissivity fluctuates dramatically in time with a probability distribution, which will lead to a fast-fluctuating attack. Therefore, the security analysis of CV-QSS in fiber channels may not apply to CV-QSS in complex channels. In this article, we study the CV-QSS protocol in the absence of uniform fast-fluctuating channels whose transmissivity changes with respect to a uniform probability distribution. We give a lower bound of secret key rate to provide security analysis against the fast-fluctuating attack for the CV-QSS protocol. In particular, the realistic highly asymmetric beam splitter (HABS) in CV-QSS protocol is investigated in detail here for the first time, and numerical simulation shows that the security bound is overestimated when the HABS is treated as the perfect device.

Keywords

• Continuous-variable (CV)
• quantum key distribution
• quantum secret sharing (QSS)