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arxiv: 2509.15951 · v2 · submitted 2025-09-19 · 🪐 quant-ph

Single-Round Deterministic Quantum Anonymous Veto Using Bell States

Ravi Sangwan , Harishankar Mishra , Henry Sukumar , Gudapati Naresh Raghava This is my paper

Pith reviewed 2026-05-18 15:35 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 🪐 quant-ph
keywords Quantum Anonymous VetoBell StatesQuantum CryptographyAnonymous VotingEntanglementQuantum Decision MakingPhotonic Implementation
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The pith

Quantum anonymous veto can be done deterministically in one round using only Bell states.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper introduces a quantum anonymous veto protocol that uses bipartite Bell states to allow participants to detect a veto without revealing who cast it. This is achieved in a single round of communication and without relying on multi-particle entanglement. The method reduces the experimental complexity compared to previous approaches, making it more feasible for real-world quantum systems. If successful, it would enable more scalable secure decision-making processes in distributed quantum networks.

Core claim

The central discovery is a deterministic protocol for quantum anonymous veto that employs Bell states for conclusive detection of veto presence in a single round, while ensuring voter anonymity, correctness, and verifiability through local operations and measurements on the entangled pairs.

What carries the argument

The protocol mechanism where each voter encodes their choice by applying a phase or operation to one half of a shared Bell state, allowing the group to determine if any veto was cast via joint measurement outcomes without identifying individuals.

Load-bearing premise

The protocol relies on the perfect distribution and manipulation of Bell states without any quantum channel imperfections or dishonest participants.

What would settle it

Demonstrating that the veto detection is not conclusive or that anonymity is compromised when Bell states are distributed over a lossy channel would disprove the protocol's claimed advantages.

read the original abstract

Quantum Anonymous Veto (QAV) protocols enable secure and anonymous decision-making by allowing participants to detect the presence of a veto without revealing individual choices. While existing QAV schemes offer strong theoretical guarantees, they face significant limitations in practical implementation due to resource requirements, scalability issues, and the need for multipartite entanglement. In this work, we propose a novel deterministic QAV protocol that leverages only bipartite entanglement in the form of Bell states and achieves conclusive veto detection in a single round. Our approach eliminates the need for multi-qubit entangled states and iterative rounds, thereby significantly reducing experimental overhead and enhancing scalability. The protocol preserves critical properties such as voter anonymity, correctness, and verifiability, making it well-suited for implementation on near-term quantum devices. Furthermore, we outline a practical photonic realization based on polarization-path encoding and discrete-time quantum walks, demonstrating its feasibility within current quantum optical platforms. This work contributes a resource-efficient and experimentally viable alternative to existing QAV schemes, advancing the prospects of secure quantum decision-making in distributed systems.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

2 major / 2 minor

Summary. The manuscript proposes a deterministic quantum anonymous veto protocol that uses only bipartite Bell states to achieve conclusive veto detection in a single round. It claims this eliminates the need for multipartite entanglement or iterative rounds while preserving voter anonymity, correctness, and verifiability, and outlines a photonic realization based on polarization-path encoding and discrete-time quantum walks.

Significance. If the security and determinism claims can be rigorously established, the protocol would offer a resource-efficient alternative to prior QAV schemes, lowering experimental overhead and improving scalability for near-term quantum devices. The focus on standard Bell states and a concrete photonic outline aligns with current experimental capabilities.

major comments (2)
  1. [§3] §3 (Protocol Description): The single-round conclusive detection and determinism are presented as following directly from perfect Bell-state correlations, but no error model, loss tolerance, or analysis of imperfect entanglement is provided. This assumption is load-bearing for the headline claim of suitability for near-term devices, as even small decoherence would collapse the veto signal or leak identity.
  2. [§4] §4 (Security Analysis): The assertions that the protocol preserves anonymity, correctness, and verifiability lack any formal proof, reduction to Bell-state properties, or analysis against dishonest participants or eavesdroppers. The text describes the operations but does not derive these properties, undermining the central security guarantees.
minor comments (2)
  1. [§5] The photonic realization section references discrete-time quantum walks but does not specify the exact mapping from Bell-state measurements to the walk operators or how they ensure single-round conclusiveness.
  2. [Introduction] Several prior QAV protocols using Bell states are cited but not compared quantitatively on resource count or round complexity.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

2 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for their constructive and detailed review of our manuscript. We address each major comment below and indicate the specific revisions we will implement to strengthen the protocol's robustness analysis and security arguments.

read point-by-point responses

  1. Referee: [§3] §3 (Protocol Description): The single-round conclusive detection and determinism are presented as following directly from perfect Bell-state correlations, but no error model, loss tolerance, or analysis of imperfect entanglement is provided. This assumption is load-bearing for the headline claim of suitability for near-term devices, as even small decoherence would collapse the veto signal or leak identity.

    Authors: We agree that the absence of an explicit error model and analysis of imperfect entanglement represents a limitation in supporting the claim of suitability for near-term devices. In the revised manuscript we will add a dedicated subsection to §3 that introduces a simple depolarizing noise model and photon-loss channel. We will derive the conditions under which the veto signal remains conclusive and quantify the degradation of anonymity when Bell-state fidelity falls below unity, thereby providing a concrete threshold for experimental viability. revision: yes

  2. Referee: [§4] §4 (Security Analysis): The assertions that the protocol preserves anonymity, correctness, and verifiability lack any formal proof, reduction to Bell-state properties, or analysis against dishonest participants or eavesdroppers. The text describes the operations but does not derive these properties, undermining the central security guarantees.

    Authors: The referee correctly identifies that the current text presents the security properties descriptively rather than through formal derivations. In the revised version we will expand §4 with explicit proofs: anonymity will be shown by proving that the reduced density operator seen by any proper subset of participants is independent of individual vote choices, using the symmetry of the shared Bell pairs; correctness and verifiability will be derived directly from the perfect anti-correlation of Bell measurements in the chosen basis. We will also add a subsection analyzing eavesdropping and dishonest-participant attacks, reducing security to the violation of the CHSH inequality and the no-cloning theorem under the honest-majority assumption. revision: yes

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

Protocol presented as direct construction from standard Bell-state operations

full rationale

The paper proposes a QAV protocol using only bipartite Bell states and discrete-time quantum walks for single-round conclusive detection. No equations, derivations, or claims in the provided text reduce by construction to fitted parameters, self-referential definitions, or load-bearing self-citations. The central properties (anonymity, correctness, verifiability) are asserted to follow directly from the described operations on ideal Bell pairs, rendering the derivation self-contained against external quantum information principles rather than internally forced.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 1 axioms · 0 invented entities

The central claim rests on standard quantum information assumptions about ideal Bell states and honest participants; no free parameters or new entities are introduced in the abstract.

axioms (1)
  • domain assumption Standard assumptions of quantum mechanics including perfect preparation and manipulation of Bell states without decoherence or loss.
    The single-round conclusive detection and security properties depend on these ideal conditions as is conventional in quantum protocol proposals.

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Reference graph

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