Multi-party blind quantum computation protocol with mutual authentication in network

Abstract

Blind quantum computation (BQC) can ensure a client with limited quantum capability safely delegates computing tasks to a remote quantum server. In order to resist attacks from ignoring identity authentication in BQC protocols, it is necessary to guarantee the legality of both clients and servers in a multi-party BQC network. So we propose a multi-party BQC protocol involving three phases to distribute shared keys and authenticate identities. Firstly, by using the advantages of measurement device independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD), the registered client and the assigned server could share the initial key safely in registration phase. Secondly, with the help of semi-honest certificate authority (CA), mutual identity authentication phase realizes the two-way authentication from both sides through the shared key simultaneously. Thirdly, in the blind quantum computing phase, a registered client can complete his computing task by just measuring the qubits from the assigned server rather than preparing the qubits. Moreover, combined with first-in-first-out (FIFO) principle, clients' authentication and blind quantum computing can be processed in parallel. The protocol can also be applied in other multi-party BQC protocols with the universality of resource states. Compared with other BQC protocols, the reliability of the protocol with identity authentication is guaranteed, and the efficiency will be significantly reflected in real experiments.

A short review on quantum identity authentication protocols: How would Bob know that he is talking with Alice?

“…Blind quantum computing (BQC) was first proposed by Childs [103], his demand was that a user (client) with limited amount of quantum resources may delegate a task to another user or quantum server having full quantum capability or more quantum power, with the condition that input and output of the client and the computational task performed are kept in private, i.e., the server or the user with higher quantum power remains blind about these information. Several schemes of BQC with identity authentication have been proposed [104][105][106], but the capability for BQC in designing schemes of QIA is not yet fully utilized. However, in Ref.…”

A Remote Quantum Error-correcting Code Preparation Protocol on Cluster State

“…[5][6][7]. In recent years, many extension BQC protocols have sprung up like mushrooms after the rain [8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. The Universal Blind Quantum Computation(UBQC) proposed by Broadbent, Fitzsimons, and Kashefi [7] stands as one of the typical protocols, which only requires Alice to prepare the single photon states.…”

“…However, in the preparation of UBQC, the qubit errors are very easy to occur due to the environment and device noises [14,16]. In order to prevent the accumulation and propagation of errors in the subsequent computation, quantum error-correcting codes [17] can be used to correct errors in the preparation process.…”

Applying Quantum Error-correcting Codes for Fault-tolerant Blind Quantum Cloud Computation

“…One possible solution to address this problem is via the Blind Quantum Computation (BQC) protocol supported by quantum cloud computing, which enables a client(say Alice) with limited quantum technology to delegate a computing task to a remote quantum server(say Bob) while ensuring computing information privacy [1], [2], [3]. In recent years, a number of BQC protocols have been proposed [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9]. Among these protocols, Universal Blind Quantum Computation (UBQC) is of particular interest as it not only can guarantee that Alice's inputs, outputs and quantum algorithms are unknown to server while delegating computation, but also only requires Alice to prepare the single photon states.…”

“…UBQC is composed of quantum preparation, quantum measurement, one-way quantum communication and two-way classical communication [11]. In the noisy intermediate-scale UBQC, due to the influence of noise, it is inevitable to make errors of qubits and quantum gates in each of stage [9], [12]. Hence, UBQC will have an interesting challenge how to deal with qubit errors.…”