Improving the security of a quantum secret sharing protocol between multiparty and multiparty without entanglement

Recently Yan and Gao [F.L. Yan, T. Gao, Phys. Rev. A 72 (2005) 012304] have proposed a quantum secret sharing protocol which allows a secret message to be shared between one group of m parties and another group of n parties. The protocol is claimed to be secure. In this Letter, first we show that any subgroup consisting of evil cooperative parties (or one and only one evil party) can successfully cheat other parties to obtain the secret message without being detected. Then we improve the original Yan-Gao protocol such that the insider's cheats are prevented. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.