Cryptanalysis of Zhang et al’s Quantum Private Comparison and the Improvement

Based on EPR pairs, Zhang et al. analyzed the security of Yang and Tseng et al’s two QPC protocols, and proposed some new improvement strategies (Zhang and Zhang, Quantum Inform. Process. 12(5):1981–1990 2013). This paper points that Zhang et al’s protocol is insecure under a special attack, i.e. Trojan-horse attacks. To avoid this attack, we present an improved QPC protocol based on single particle encryption. Through security analysis of presented protocol, the improved protocol can resist Trojan horse attack (THA). We give a suggestion that non-orthogonal quantum states can be used to transmit information for reducing the leakage in a QPC protocol.