Threshold Secret Sharing Scheme for Compartmented Access Structures

In the realm of visual cryptography, secret sharing is the predominant method of transmission and reception of secure data. Most of the (n, n) secret sharing schemes suffer from one common flaw — locking of information when the all- n number of receivers are not available for some reason. This paper proposes a new method of compartmented secret sharing scheme where some threshold number of equally privileged from each compartment can retrieve data. This scheme rules out regeneration of secret image at the single compartment thereby eliminating the danger of misusing secret image. The key features of this scheme are: better visual quality of the recovered image with no pixel expansion; non-requirement of half toning of color images; less computational complexity by reconstructing secret through XORing and simple addition of all share images. This scheme is highly beneficial in applications where data has to be stored securely in a database and in cloud computing to synchronize information passed to different groups or clusters from a single host.