Multiparty Quantum Key Agreement With Strong Fairness Property

Multiparty Key Agreement (MKA) is the backbone for secure multiparty communication. Although numerous efficient MKA-cryptosystems are available in the classical field, their security relies on the assumption that some computational issues are infeasible. To overcome this dependency, a new area, quantum cryptography, evolves to support key agreement among two or more participants securely. In this paper, first, we present a two-part quantum key agreement with Strong Fairness Property (SFP) and extends it to a Multiparty Quantum Key Agreement (MQKA) protocol. In the first round of proposed MQKA, a participant will act as a group controller (GC) and establishes two-party groups with each of the residual participants and agreed on a quantum two-party-style shared key per each of the two-party. In the second round, the GC computes public keys for each of the respective parties by combining these two-party keys using XOR-operation, excluding that party's two-party key. Next, the GC sends separate public keys to the individual participants. After receiving the respective public-key, each of the respective participants computes the multiparty key by joining their public-key with their two-party key using XOR. Finally, GC computes the multiparty key, as the GC knows all the two-party keys, it combines them with XOR and acts as a usual group participant. The proposed protocol has compared with other renowned MQKA protocols in terms of four standards parameters, namely transmission number (TN), qubit measurement number (QM), qubit for channel checking (QCC), and the qubit efficiency (QE) and acceptable results achieved. The security of the proposed MQKA relies on the absolute security of a two-part quantum key agreement with Strong Fairness Property (SFP). Moreover, it is secure against both internal and external attacks.