Secret sharing (SS) is one of the most important cryptographic primitives used for data outsourcing. The (t, n,) SS was introduced by Shamir and Blakley separately in 1979. The secret sharing policy of the (t, n) threshold SS is far too simple for many applications because it assumes that every shareholder has equal privilege to the secret or every shareholder is equally trusted. Ito et al. introduced the concept of a general secret sharing scheme (GSS). In a GSS, a secret is divided among a set of shareholders in such a way that any "qualified" subset of shareholders can access the secret, bu...