Improvement of the Semi-quantum Secret Sharing Protocol of Specific Bits

Recently, Gao et al. (Int. J. Theor. Phys. 56(8), 2512–2520 (2017)) pointed out that Yin and Fu’s semi-quantum secret sharing (SQSS) protocol of specific bits is not semi-quantum and suggested an improved one. In this paper, an improvement for Gao et al.’s protocol is proposed. Different from Gao et al.’s protocol, the proposed improved protocol prepares single photons to form both the message sequences and the checking sequences. As a result, compared with Gao et al.’s protocol, the improved protocol is much easier to realize in practice, due to no use of quantum entangled states and their measurements, and has higher quantum efficiency.