New Quantum Protocol for Sharing a Secret Among Many Parties

(AZoQuantum) At the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, scientists have presented a record-setting quantum protocol that helps share a secret among several parties.
The research group developed an 11-dimensional quantum state and employed it to share a secret among 10 parties. The secret can be revealed by using quantum tricks only if the parties believe each other.
The study, which sets a new record for the dimension of the state (which influences how huge the secret can be) and the number of parties with whom it is shared, is an essential step toward distributing data securely across several nodes in a quantum network.
The Wits researchers used structured light as quantum photon states to demonstrate how data can be distributed from one sender to 10 parties. They then used certain crafty quantum tricks to design the protocol such that the secret can be unlocked only if the parties believe one another.
“Our work pushes the state-of-the-art and brings quantum communication closer to true network implementation. When you think of networks you think of many connections, many parties, who wish to share information and not just two. Now we know how to do this the quantum way,” said Andrew Forbes, Professor, School of Physics, University of the Witwatersrand.