In the paper [2010 Chin. Phys. B 19 050306], Yang et al. put forward a novel three-party quantum secret sharing protocol of secure direct communication based on x-type entangled states, they claimed that the scheme is secure. However, in this paper, we study the security of the protocol and find that it is insecure. Applying intercept and resend attack, the agent Bob can obtain Alice＇s secret without the help from the other agent Charlie. In the end, we give our effective modification for its improvement.
This paper proposes a protocol for multi-party quantum secret sharing utilizing four non-orthogonal two-particle entangled states following some ideas in the schemes proposed by Liu et al. （2006 Chin. Phys. Lett. 23 3148） and Zhang et al. （2009 Chin. Phys. B 18 2149） respectively. The theoretical efficiency for qubits of the new protocol is improved from 50% to approaching 100%. All the entangled states can be used for generating the private key except those used for the eavesdropping check. The validity of a probable attack called opaque cheat attack to this kind of protocols is considered in the paper for the first time.
