Efficient Three-Party Quantum Secret Sharing with Single Photons

A scheme for three-party quantum secret sharing of a private key is presented with single photons. The agent Bob first prepares a sequence of single photons with two biased bases and then sends them to the boss Alice who checks the security of the transmission with measurements and produces some decoy photons by rearranging the orders of some sample photons. Alice encodes her bits with two unitary operations on the photons
and then sends them to the other agent. The security of this scheme is equivalent to that in the modified Bennett--Brassard 1984 quantum key distribution protocol. Moreover, each photon can carry one bit of the private key and the intrinsic efficiency for qubits and the total efficiency both approach the maximal value 100% when the number of the bits in the key is very large.