Traditional secret sharing schemes assume that all participants within a group or compartment possess equal authority in reconstructing the secret. However, in many real-world applications, such as hierarchical organizational structures or secure multi-party collaborations, this assumption does not hold. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Multilevel Compartment Threshold Secret Image Sharing (MCT-SIS) scheme that introduces hierarchical privileges within each compartment. Our scheme is based on a combination of Tassa’s hierarchical access structure and Ghodosi’s compartment model, and utilizes Birkhoff interpolation and polynomial-based techniques to achieve robust and flexible secret image sharing. Participants are grouped into disjoint compartments, each with multiple levels of access, and the secret image is shared such that it can only be reconstructed when both compartmental and hierarchical threshold conditions are satisfied. The scheme ensures perfect secrecy, lossless reconstruction, and reduced storage overhead. Experimental results validate its feasibility and demonstrate its applicability to environments requiring fine-grained access control, such as collaborative data vaults, medical imaging systems, and secure multi-agency operations.

NABIYEV V.

PhD, professor, faculty of engineering, department of computer engineering, Karadeniz Technical university, Trabzon, Turkey

Е-mail: vasif@ktu.edu.tr, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0314-8134

SOLEYMANZADEH K.

PhD, teacher, faculty of engineering and natural sciences, software engineering department, Istanbul health and technology university, İstanbul, Turkey

Е-mail: katira.soleymanzadeh@istun.edu.tr, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7557-2877

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