Participant attack on quantum secret sharing based on entanglement swapping

The security of quantum secret sharing based on entanglement swapping is revisited and a participant attack is presented. In this attack two dishonest agents together can illegally recover the secret quantum state without the help of any other controller, and it will not be detected by any other users. Furthermore, by modifying the distribution process of particles and adding a detection step after each distribution process, we propose an improved protocol which can resist this kind of attack.