SSBAS-FA: A secure sealed-bid e-auction scheme with fair arbitration based on time-released blockchain

Abstract

Electronic auctions are becoming more and more popular in business activities, which provide the professionals with competitive prices for their products, pitching the suppliers directly against each other to allow suppliers to bid online against a published specification. In sealed-bid e-auctions, bidders send sealed-bid envelopes to auctioneer and auctioneer only can open them after a certain period of time to announce the highest bidder. In order to solve the issue of the opacity of whole sealed-bid auction process, researchers try to solve this problem by incorporating the blockchain technique into the e-auction systems with the properties of unforgeable transaction and public ledger of the blockchain. However, since the auctioneer might open the bid envelope before the deadline of the auction, it can tamper the bid price by colluding with malicious bidders for personal profit. In this paper, we propose a time-released blockchain-based sealed-bid e-auction scheme. We use time-lock encryption to ensure that the bidders’ bid data will not be available to anyone until a specified time, thus guaranteeing the security of the bidders’ data. At the same time, we use smart contracts for auction verification, which further improves the security of the scheme and avoids tampering by malicious auctioneers. In addition, we propose a secure sealed-bid e-auction scheme with fair arbitration (namely, SSBAS-FA), that is based on time-released blockchain to provide a fair arbitration mechanism in punishing malicious bidders. We give the deployment of a time-released blockchain that eliminates the demand of the trusted third party to perform the validation of the smart contract. We provide the fair arbitration for the bidder and auctioneer. The security analysis and performance evaluation indicate that our scheme is secure, fair and efficient in sealed-bid e-auction system.