Multiparty quantum secret sharing with pure entangled states and decoy photons

We present a scheme for multiparty quantum secret sharing of a private key with pure entangled states and decoy photons. The boss, say Alice uses the decoy photons, which are randomly in one of the four nonorthogonal single-photon states, to prevent a potentially dishonest agent from eavesdropping freely. This scheme requires the parties of communication to have neither an ideal single-photon quantum source nor a maximally entangled one, which makes this scheme more convenient than others in a practical application. Moreover, it has the advantage of having high intrinsic efficiency for qubits and exchanging less classical information in principle. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.