Improvements on “Secure multi-party quantum summation based on quantum Fourier transform”

Recently, a quantum multi-party summation protocol based on the quantum Fourier transform has been proposed (Yang et al. in Quantum Inf Process 17:129, 2018). The protocol claims to be secure against both outside and participant attacks. However, a closer look reveals that the player in charge of generating the required multi-partite entangled states can launch two kinds of attacks to learn about other parties’ private integer strings without being caught. In this paper, we present these attacks and propose countermeasures to make the protocol secure again. The improved protocol not only can resist these attacks but also remove the need for the quantum Fourier transform and encoding quantum operations by participants.