Trustworthy sealed-bid auction with low communication cost atop blockchain (Q6126676)

In this paper the authors present a sealed-bid auction protocol with privacy preserving and public verifiability atop blockchain. No bidder is able to repudiate or change any bidding to outbid others and all public information comes with proof that even observers are able to validate the auction. Proofs post along the way to validate biddings and identify the winner are in the form of group elements with communication complexity \(O(\log (nm))\), where \(n,m\) denoting the upper bound bit length of the bidding price and the number of bidders respectively. The logarithmic complexity significantly reduces the communication cost and makes it practical for large-scale auction. The protocol guarantees the correctness of auction result in two aspects: the validation of bidding and the trustworthiness of the winner. When a majority of dishonest bidders form a collusive ring, each bidder learns nothing other than his own input and the identifier of the winner thus guaranteeing privacy for losing bidders. Section 5 provides detailed security proofs and analysis of corresponding security properties. The implementation results of the protocol is reported in Section 6.