Quantum key agreement protocols with four-qubit cluster states

Based on unitary operations and four-qubit cluster states, a two-party and a three-party quantum key agreement protocols are proposed, respectively, in this paper. The two-party protocol allows that each participant contributes equally to the agreement key by one party performing the unitary operations on two photons of a cluster state and another party performing the delayed measurement on the transformed cluster state. In the three-party scheme, each party can extract the other two parties' secret keys, respectively, encoded in the different photons of the same cluster state by performing the measurement with cluster basis and fairly generates the shared key. The security analysis shows that the two protocols can resist against both participant and outsider attacks. Furthermore, the two protocols also achieve high qubit efficiency.