Quantum Multi-Party Threshold Private Set Intersection with Explicit Cardinality Testing

2026-06-26

AI Summary

This work addresses a critical limitation in existing quantum threshold private set intersection (TPSI) protocols, which rely on a third party to interpret results and thus violate the explicit cardinality-testing paradigm. The paper presents the first multi-party quantum TPSI protocol that eliminates the need for third-party semantic interpretation. By encoding hidden labels via rotation of single-photon sequences and integrating oblivious linear evaluation (OLE) with lightweight garbled circuits, the protocol enables threshold testing and conditional intersection reconstruction without revealing any semantic information. The authors formally prove the protocol’s correctness and security, and demonstrate its feasibility through Qiskit-based simulations. This study achieves, for the first time in quantum TPSI, privacy-preserving explicit cardinality testing.

Abstract

Threshold private set intersection (TPSI) allows parties to reveal their intersection only when its cardinality reaches a prescribed threshold. Existing quantum TPSI protocols typically rely on a third party (TP) to interpret the final results, which deviates from the cardinality-testing paradigm of TPSI. In this paper, we propose a quantum multiparty TPSI protocol with explicit cardinality testing. Our protocol develops a rotation-based quantum construction in which single-photon sequences are sequentially processed through participant-side data rotations, TP--participant masking rotations, and correlated aggregate rotations. This design produces hidden-label measurement vectors: TP can complete the final measurement, but cannot interpret the semantic meaning of the outcomes. Based on these hidden measurements, we further realize the threshold decision through an oblivious linear evaluation (OLE)-based inner product procedure and a lightweight garbled circuit, revealing only \(\mathbf 1[|\bigcap_i X_i|\ge τ]\) before conditional intersection reconstruction. We prove the correctness and security of the proposed protocol, and further validate its feasibility through quantum-circuit simulations implemented on the IBM \textsf{Qiskit} platform.

Problem

• Threshold Private Set Intersection
• Quantum Multi-Party Computation
• Explicit Cardinality Testing
• Third-Party Independence
• Private Set Intersection

Innovation

• quantum TPSI
• explicit cardinality testing
• rotation-based quantum construction
• oblivious linear evaluation
• hidden-label measurement