Semi-quantum secret sharing protocol using W-state

Quantum secret sharing protocol, which lets a master share a secret with his/her agents and the agents can recover the master's secret when they collaborate, is an important research issue in the quantum information field. In order to make the quantum protocol more practical, the concept of semi-quantum protocol is advanced by Boyer et al. Based on this concept, many semi-quantum secret sharing protocols have been proposed. The various entanglement states (including Bell state, GHZ state and so on) were used to be the quantum resources in these SQSS protocols, except for W-state which is the other multi-qubit entanglement state and different from GHZ states. Therefore, this study wants to use the entanglement property of W-state to propose the first three-party SQSS protocol and analyze the proposed protocol is free from the well-known attacks.