Quantum Sealed-Bid Auction Without a Trusted Third Party

Abstract

A sealed-bid auction is an essential tool for trading commodities in modern society. However, the non-winning bidders in previously proposed sealed-bid auction schemes lack privacy protection. In this paper, we define a sealed-bid auction with strong privacy protection, which can protect the privacy of all non-winning bidders. In order to fulfil the task, we first present a quantum secret sharing protocol and a secure quantum summation protocol and then design their corresponding quantum circuits, where the security of the latter is guaranteed by the former, while the former is information-theoretically secure. We further present a quantum seal-bid auction (QSA) scheme with strong privacy protection based on the designed quantum protocols. In our QSA scheme, each bidder first encodes a private vector by his private bid and public agreement information, and then all bidders jointly compute the summations of their respective private vectors without a trusted third party. Finally, we verify the correctness and the feasibility of the proposed QSA scheme by circuit simulations in IBM Qiskit.