Quantum Secure Direct Communication with Mutual Authentication using a Single Basis

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new theoretical scheme for quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) with user authentication. Different from the previous QSDC protocols, the present protocol uses only one orthogonal basis of single-qubit states to encode the secret message. Moreover, this is a one-time and one-way communication protocol, which uses qubits prepared in a randomly chosen arbitrary basis, to transmit the secret message. We discuss the security of the proposed protocol against some common attacks and show that no eaves-dropper can get any information from the quantum and classical channels. We have also studied the performance of this protocol under realistic device noise. We have executed the protocol in IBMQ Armonk device and proposed a repetition code based protection scheme that requires minimal overhead.