Beyond the Canonical Protocol: Quantum Encrypted Cloning from Secret-Sharing Access Structures

Quantum Physics [Submitted on 4 Jun 2026] Beyond the Canonical Protocol: Quantum Encrypted Cloning from Secret-Sharing Access Structures Gabriele Gianini, Stelvio Cimato, Jianyi Lin, Omar Hasan, Corrado Mio, Ernesto Damiani Quantum encrypted cloning shows that an unknown quantum state can be distributed into multiple encrypted copies without contradicting the no-cloning theorem: each copy is unusable on its own, but can be redeemed together with a suitable quantum key. Recent work has related canonical encrypted-cloning protocols to particular forms of quantum secret sharing. Here we take the converse perspective: instead of mapping a given encrypted-cloning protocol into QSS, we use QSS access structures as a design library from which encrypted-cloning schemes can be extracted. The criterion is access-structural. A QSS scheme supports a quantum encrypted-cloning structure whenever it contains a family of qualified sets with a non-qualified common intersection. The common subsystem is interpreted as the key, while the non-common parts are interpreted as encrypted clones relative to that key. Thus quantum encrypted cloning does not require a new notion of recoverability beyond QSS; what changes is the operational reading of QSS constituents as a mechanism for delayed and alternative redemption opportunities. This viewpoint separates redemption from perfect secrecy. Perfect QSS yields encrypted-cloning schemes with forbidden non-qualified subsystems, whereas ramp QSS naturally allows intermediate, partially informative non-redeeming subsystems. The resulting framework broadens quantum encrypted cloning from a specific protocol to a general access-structure primitive. We illustrate the extraction principle with threshold-like, ramp, hierarchical, and compartmented architectures, showing how encrypted clones may be symmetric or asymmetric, individual or composite, perfectly hidden or leaky. Equivalently, these constructions can be viewed as overlapping erasure-recovery regions of an isometric quantum code. This establishes secret sharing as a systematic design language for encrypted quantum redundancy. Comments: 15 pages Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) MSC classes: 81P94, 94A60 ACM classes: E.3 Cite as: arXiv:2606.06552 [quant-ph]   (or arXiv:2606.06552v1 [quant-ph] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.06552 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Gabriele Gianini [view email] [v1] Thu, 4 Jun 2026 09:23:16 UTC (39 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: quant-ph < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.CR References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)