Semi-Quantum Private Comparison Using Single Photons

Recently, by using the BB84 quantum key distribution (QKD) protocol, Sun et al. put forward two quantum private comparison (QPC) protocols with a semi-honest third party (TP) and a malicious TP, respectively (Sun et al., Quantum Inf. Process. 14, 2125–2133, 2015). In this paper, we absorb the concept of semi-quantumness suggested by Boyer et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 99(14), 140501, 2007 and Phys. Rev. A 79(3), 032341, 2009) into Sun et al.’s QPC protocols and construct two corresponding SQPC protocols. The common interesting feature of the proposed SQPC protocols is that apart from the establishment of shared keys between different participants, the rest parts of the protocols are completely classical. The output correctness and the security of the proposed SQPC protocols are validated. Compared with the present SQPC protocols, the advantages of the proposed SQPC protocols lies in the following aspects: on the aspect of quantum resource, they employ single photons rather than Bell entangled states; with respect to quantum measurement for TP, they need single-photon measurements rather than Bell state measurements; as for quantum entanglement swapping, they do not need it at all; and the second proposed SQPC protocol takes effect under a malicious TP and makes TP know neither the genuine contents of secret inputs nor the comparison result.