Abstract
In a competitive market, online auction systems enable optimal trading of digital products and services. Bidders can participate in existing blockchain-based auctions while protecting the confidentiality of their bids in a decentralized, transparent, secure, and auditable manner. However, in a competitive market, parties would prefer not to disclose their interests to competitors, and to remain anonymous during auctions. In this paper, we firstly analyze the specific requirements for blockchain-based anonymous fair auctions. We present a formal model tailored to study auction systems that facilitate anonymity, as well as a generic protocol for achieving bid confidentiality and bidder anonymity using existing cryptographic primitives such as designated verifier ring signature. We demonstrate that it is secure using the security model we presented. Towards the end, we demonstrate through extensive simulation results on Ethereum blockchain that the proposed protocol is practical and has minimal associated overhead. Furthermore, we discuss the complexity and vulnerabilities that a blockchain environment might introduce during implementation.
Highlights
Galal and Youssef [12] presented a smart contract for verifiable first-price sealed-bid auction on the Ethereum blockchain
The use case auction in a fair market that we present in Section 1.2 requires additional cryptographic primitives in order to be successfully achieved
We have introduced a generic protocol for anonymous fair trade using only standard cryptographic building blocks
Summary
The anonymity in sealed-bid auctions is a well investigated area of research. these solutions can not directly be endorsed to apply on blockchain-based auctions. Contracts have been employed to handle transactional privacy on Ethereum blockchain They focused on presenting a framework which can simultaneously support several applications such as sealed-bid auction, rock paper scissor game, crowdfunding application and swap financial instrument. Strain [11] presented a protocol to build a blockchain-based sealed-bid auction, preserving bid privacy against malicious parties. Galal and Youssef [12] presented a smart contract for verifiable first-price sealed-bid auction on the Ethereum blockchain. Similar to Zcash, they used MPC among auctioneer and bidders to derive Common Reference String (CRS) during ZeroKnowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARgument of Knowledge (zk-SNARK) set up Some interesting approaches such as Anon-Pass [14] and SEAL [15] can be further tailored for blockchain implementation. Public Key Encryption, ¶ Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARgument of Knowledge, $ Not Implemented
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
