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
d−k+1d by contacting d ≥ 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. In these schemes the combiner can contact any d parties at the time of recovery where k ≤ d ≤ n. This is the first such class of universal communication efficient quantum threshold schemes.
Recently, a class of quantum secret sharing schemes called communication efficient quantum threshold secret sharing schemes (CE-QTS) was introduced. These schemes reduced the quantum communication cost during secret recovery in quantum threshold secret sharing schemes. However, non-threshold schemes are known to have less storage cost compared to threshold schemes. This motivates us to extend the idea of communication efficiency to non-threshold schemes as well. In this paper, we introduce a general class of communication efficient quantum secret sharing schemes (CE-QSS) which include both threshold and non-threshold schemes. Specifically, we provide a framework for constructing CE-QSS schemes by concatenating a pair of CSS codes. The main component in this framework is a new class of Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) codes called the extended CSS codes.