https://doi.org/10.1140/epjqt/s40507-025-00422-6
Research
A transferable quantum anonymous ranking protocol without third party
1
School of Mathematical Science, Heilongjiang University, Xuefu, 150080, Harbin, China
2
School of Computer Science and Big Data (School of Cybersecurity), Heilongjiang University, Xuefu, 150080, Harbin, China
3
School of Information Science and Engineering, Linyi University, Linyi, 276000, Shandong, China
4
State Key Laboratory of Public Big Data, Guizhou University, Huaxi, 550000, Guiyang, China
5
Institute for Cryptology and Network Security, Heilongjiang University, Xuefu, 150080, Harbin, China
a
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b
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Received:
19
July
2025
Accepted:
16
September
2025
Published online:
29
September
2025
Quantum Anonymous Multi-party Ranking (QAMR) enables quantum ranking operations to be performed on private datasets while concealing associations between participants and their private data. However, most existing protocols rely on semi-honest third parties and require the use of a large number of quantum states to ensure identity anonymity. Furthermore, they lack transferability due to inadequate modular design. To address these issues, a novel QAMR protocol is proposed, which eliminates the need for semi-honest third parties for the first time. The protocol achieves reduced quantum resource consumption while ensuring transferability. Moreover, the protocol’s correctness is proven by theoretical analysis, and its feasibility is confirmed via IBM Qiskit simulations. A thorough security analysis shows that the protocol is resistant to collusion, entanglement-measurement, and intercept-resend attacks. Besides, the comparison shows that the suggested approach uses fewer quantum resources while processing datasets with wider distributions and higher limits.
Key words: Quantum anonymous multi-party ranking / Without third party / Transferability / d-dimensional single-particle states
© The Author(s) 2025
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