The design of a secure and fair sealed-bid auction service

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a secure and fair sealed-bid auction scheme. It uses a threshold cryptosystem without the assistance of a mutually entrusted party to guarantee fairness among bidders. In this scheme, the computations among bidders are independent and they only have to send an anonymous message to the clerk after the registration phase. Besides, we use modern cryptographic techniques like fair blind signatures and untraceable e-mail systems to design a real, fair, and secure sealed-bid auction scheme.