Towards Efficient Privacy-Preserving Auction Mechanism for Two-Sided Cloud Markets

Abstract

Auction is an efficient trading mechanism for cloud markets and adopted by many major cloud providers, such as Amazon EC2. However, most cloud auction designs only target at economic robustness without considering the bidding privacy leakage, which would dramatically hamper the practical applications of truthful cloud auctions. Existing secure cloud auction mechanisms only work on the single-sided cloud markets rather than more practical two-sided markets, and these schemes are too unwieldy to be practical due to significant computation and communication overheads. To fill these gaps, in this paper we propose a privacy-preserving double auction mechanism for two-sided cloud markets, which would not leak any bidding information beyond the auction results to anyone. Technically, we start by presenting a novel secure sorting protocol in the mixed form, which combines additive secret sharing and garbled circuits together. On this basis, our design for secure cloud auction is implemented given consideration to bidding privacy and auction efficiency. Finally, we use extensive experiments to validate its efficacy and performance.