A (k, n) secret document sharing with meaningful shares

A (k, n) Secret document sharing (SDS) was first proposed by Tu and Hsu. A secret document is shared into n noise-like shares with a public meaningful cover document. In Tu and Hsu's (k, n)-SDS, any k or more shares with the public document are collaboratively used for recovering the secret document. Recently, Liu et al. enhanced Tu and Hsu's (k, n)-SDS with by reducing the share size and the time complexity of generation and recovery. Consider an application scenario that a participant involved in various (k, n)-SDSs. A participant may hold several noise-like shares. These noise-like shares are visually identical and indistinguishable, such that they are and not easily managed. Both previous (k, n)-SDSs have noise-like shares. In this paper, a (k, n)-SDS with meaningful shares is investigated. Differing from existing (k, n)-SDS methods, our SDS provides easy management for shares, and meantime can deliver additional information to respective participants based on these meaningful shares. Moreover, experiments and comparisons are demonstrated to show the merits of the proposed scheme.