Universal Communication Efficient Quantum Threshold Secret Sharing Schemes

Quantum secret sharing (QSS) is a cryptographic protocol in which a quantum secret is distributed among a number of parties where some subsets of the parties are able to recover the secret while some subsets are unable to recover the secret. In the standard $((k,n))$ quantum threshold secret sharing scheme, any subset of $k$ or more parties out of the total $n$ parties can recover the secret while other subsets have no information about the secret. But recovery of the secret incurs a communication cost of at least $k$ qudits for every qudit in the secret. Recently, a class of communication efficient QSS schemes were proposed which can improve this communication cost to $\frac{d}{d-k+1}$ by contacting $d\geq k$ parties where $d$ is fixed prior to the distribution of shares. In this paper, we propose a more general class of $((k,n))$ quantum secret sharing schemes with low communication complexity. Our schemes are universal in the sense that the combiner can contact any number of parties to recover the secret with communication efficiency i.e. any $d$ in the range $k\leq d\leq n$ can be chosen by the combiner. This is the first such class of universal communication efficient quantum threshold schemes.