A public auction scheme based on group signature

Abstract

Electronic auction is an attractive form of electronic commerce and recently many kind of auction services are provided over the Internet. In group signature schemes, group members can be verified to have valid membership and have the ability to sign messages anonymously, in addition, group signature schemes have many special properties such as anonymity, unlinkability, traceabi-lity, coalition-resistance, non-framing etc. Therefore, many articles regard group signature schemes as a kind of effective tools in the design of auction schemes. However, as in group signature schemes, group manager has a special authority, and it is rather difficult to revoke a bidder effectively, only a few studies on auction schemes based on group signatures have been reported as long as we know, while not being satisfactory enough. In this paper, we propose a new practical public auction scheme based on group signature, in which group manager's ability is limited, the privacy of bidder is protected, and an efficient revocation method is provided. As a result, our scheme has salient advantages than previous ones.