Auction Protocol Research Articles

Sports League Quality, Broadcaster TV Rights Bids and Wholesale Regulation of Sports Channels

In a complete information auction, two integrated broadcasters bid for exclusive TV-rights to a sports league (e.g. the English Premier League), with two potential externalities: receipts feed through to the two league clubs who choose player expenditures, possibly enhancing league quality and the resulting sports channel (e.g. Sky Sports); also the right’s winner either offers the channel wholesale creating a product-differentiated retail duopoly, or forecloses. Under laissez-faire, outcomes can be “quality-driven” or “rivaldriven” depending on league/broadcaster parameters and auction protocol, and foreclosure never happens. Ofcom’s suggested wholesale regulation of Sky Sports typically reduces league rights income, quality and consumer surpluses.

Software agents based simulation for the assessment of technical indicators

Considering the inconvenients that the assessment of technical indicators may handle in a real stock market, an agent based simulation model is presented in this document as an alternative where two micro aspects are considered for this kind of systems: agents’ decision making mechanisms and the continuous double auction protocol through which transactions are made. In particular, the following indicators are analyzed in an empirical way: Simple, Double and Triple Weighted Moving Averages; Momentum, ROC, MACD and RSI throughout a series of simulations for 280 agents adding also external factors that may affect prices by using a Brownian motion model.

A repeated Bayesian auction game for cognitive radio spectrum sharing scheme

Due to the remarkable growth in the number of users and the limited spectrum resource, an efficient spectrum sharing scheme is very important and has been an active area of research over the years. Auction model is a rich mathematical tool and widely used to solve the spectrum allocation problem in cognitive radio networks. In this paper, a new spectrum sharing scheme is proposed based on the repeated auction model. In the proposed scheme, users adaptively decide their prices by using the Bayesian game approach and share spectrum bands based on the double auction protocol. According to a distributed control manner, the proposed scheme is dynamic and flexible that can adaptively respond to current system conditions. With a simulation study, it is confirmed that the effective solution of spectrum sharing is achieved under widely diverse system environments.

A sealed‐bid multi‐attribute auction protocol with strong bid privacy and bidder privacy

ABSTRACTIn this paper, a sealed‐bid multi‐attribute auction protocol that mainly focuses on security issues (i.e., bid privacy, bidder anonymity, and fairness problem) is presented. In recent years, existing literatures mainly focus on the multi‐attribute winner determination problem and other issues, but research of multi‐attribute e‐auction just begin from the perspective of information security. The new proposal is motivated by the conflict between bidder anonymity and denial‐of‐service attack from an insider. It utilizes private set intersection method to solve the privacy problem of winner determination of sealed‐bid multi‐attribute auction. The proposed sealed‐bid auction scheme preserves the strong privacy of the bids and provides verifiable correctness. According to the security analysis, it satisfies the security requirements of an e‐auction. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An Interactive Approach for Multi-Attribute Resource Allocation in Grids

Auction-based models and protocols introduce money and pricing as the technique for coordination between users and producers of resources in grids. In this paper, we propose a multi-attribute reverse auction protocol to allocate grid resource. In order to enhance the information efficiency we develop a novel interactive approach supporting both user agents and producer agents. In this approach, an iterative algorithm used to estimate the resource user’s preference utility function can facilitate producer agents to update their bids with incomplete information. Numerical simulating experiments show that our approach can satisfy the resource user’s quality demand on multiple attributes, and achieve high efficiency in user utility. The results also provide an idea to analyze the two-side private information problem in gird resource allocation.

Efficient Secure Auction Protocols Based on the Boneh-Goh-Nissim Encryption

This paper presents efficient secure auction protocols for first price auction and second price auction. Previous auction protocols are based on a generally secure multi-party protocol called mix-and-match protocol. However, the time complexity of the mix-and-match protocol is large, although it can securely calculate any logical circuits. The proposed protocols reduce the number of times the mix-and-match protocol is used by replacing them with the Boneh-Goh-Nissim encryption, which enables calculation of 2-DNF of encrypted data.

Anonymous sealed bid auction protocol based on a variant of the dining cryptographers’ protocol

Sealed bid auctions are a popular means of high-stakes bidding, as they eliminate the temporal element from the auction process, allowing participants to take less emotional, more thoughtful decisions. In this paper, we propose a digital communication protocol for conducting sealed bid auctions with high stakes, where the anonymity of bids as well as other aspects of fairness must be protected. The Dining Cryptographers’ Protocol (denoted by DC) was presented by David Chaum in 1988. The protocol allows the participants to broadcast a message anonymously. In a recent paper (Another Twist in the Dining Cryptographers’ Protocol, submitted to the Journal of Cryptology) the authors propose a variant of the original DC eliminating its main disadvantages. In this paper we present a cryptographic protocol realizing anonymous sealed bid auctions, such as first price or Vickrey auction, based on this variant. The proposed scheme allows to identify at least one dishonest participant violating the protocol without using of Trusted Third Parties. Additionally, we require that bids are binding. It is achieved by enabling all participants acting in concert (the so-called “angry mob”) to find out the identity of the winner, in case the winner fails to make the purchase.

DECLARATIVE SPECIFICATION OF FAULT TOLERANT AUCTION PROTOCOLS: THE ENGLISH AUCTION CASE STUDY

Auction mechanisms are nowadays widely used in electronic commerce Web sites for buying and selling items among different users. The increasing importance of auction protocols in the negotiation phase is not limited to online marketplaces. In fact, the wide applicability of auctions as resource-allocation and negotiation mechanisms have also led to a great deal of interest in auctions within the agent community. A challenging issue for agents operating in open Multiagent Systems (such as the emerging semantic Web infrastructure) concerns the specification of declarative communication rules which could be published and shared allowing agents to dynamically engage well-known and trusted negotiation protocols. To cope with real-world applications, these rules should also specify fault tolerant patterns of interaction, enabling negotiating agents to interact with each other tolerating failures, for instance terminating an auction process even if some bidding agents dynamically crash. In this paper, we propose an approach to specify fault tolerant auction protocols in open and dynamic environments by means of communication rules dealing with crash failures of agents. We illustrate these concepts considering a case study about the specification of an English Auction protocol which tolerate crashes of bidding agents and we discuss its properties. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

A Cryptographic Moving-Knife Cake-Cutting Protocol

This paper proposes a cake-cutting protocol using cryptography when the cake is a heterogeneous good that is represented by an interval on a real line. Although the Dubins-Spanier moving-knife protocol with one knife achieves simple fairness, all players must execute the protocol synchronously. Thus, the protocol cannot be executed on asynchronous networks such as the Internet. We show that the moving-knife protocol can be executed asynchronously by a discrete protocol using a secure auction protocol. The number of cuts is n-1 where n is the number of players, which is the minimum.

Bidder-anonymous English auction protocol based on revocable ring signature

Privacy has become a factor of increasing importance in auction design. This paper introduces an efficient and spontaneous privacy-preserving English auction protocol based on revocable ring signature. The proposed protocol has three appealing characteristic: first, it offers conditional privacy-preservation: while the auctioneer can verify that a bidder is an authorized participant in the system only the collaboration of auctioneer and registration manager can reveal the true identity of a malicious bidder. Second, it is one-time registration: the bidder can take part in plural auctions in one time registration. Third, it is spontaneous: the bidder can bid without interaction with the auctioneer and other bidders. Finally, it is efficient: it saves the communication round complexity comparing with previously proposed solutions.

Evaluation of an Economy-Based File Replication Strategy for Malaysian Research and Education Network (MYREN) Data Grid Model

This paper discusses a simulation based file replication for Malaysian Research and Education Network (MYREN) Data Grid topology. This simulation evaluates a novel replication strategy, based on an economic model, which optimizes both the selection of replicas for running jobs and the dynamic creation of replicas in MYREN Grid sites. The optimization agents are located on MYREN Grid sites and use an auction protocol for selecting the optimal replica of a data file and a prediction function to make informed decisions about local data replication. Our primary objective of this study is to determine the optimal replication needs to be selecting when given a request by a job for a particular file in MYREN Data Grid implementation. The second objective is to trigger both replication and deletion of data files in MYREN Grid sites by analyzing the pattern of previous file requests; thereby affecting the migration of files toward sites that show a corresponding increased frequency of file-access requests. In MYREN topology, the major issue is data latency. In order to solve this issue, data replication is considered to be an important technique in reducing jobs execution. Replication involves the creation of identical copies of data files and their distribution over MYREN sites. We evaluate the replication strategy using a Data Grid simulator called OptorSim. Our simulation results showed that the technique can significantly reduce data access latency and increase the robustness of Grid application.

Cryptanalysis and melioration of secure quantum sealed-bid auction with post-confirmation

We investigate the quantum sealed-bid auction protocol proposed by Zhao et al. (Opt Commun 283:1394, 2010). It uses M groups n-particle GHZ states to represent bids and a post-confirmation mechanism to guarantee the honesty of the quantum sealed-bid auction. However, in our opinion the protocol still does not complete the task of a sealed-bid auction fairly. It is shown that a large group of dishonest bidders can collude to obtain all the other one's secret bids before the opening phase of the auction with a probability polynomially close to one. Moreover, a simple feasible improvement of the protocol is proposed.

Simulation-Based Auction Protocol for Resource Scheduling Problems

Resource scheduling, or the allocation of resources over time, is a challenging problem in large-scale or multiple-project environments. Traditional network scheduling techniques are ineffective in modeling the dynamic nature and resource interactions of large or multiunit projects. This paper presents a simulation-based auction protocol (SBAP) to solve resource scheduling problems in large-scale construction projects. SBAP is a hybrid framework that integrates multi agent resource allocation (MARA) in a simulation environment. SBAP deploys a centralized resource allocation approach, referred to as an auction protocol, whereby agents bid on different combinations of resources at the start of a simulation cycle. Agents attempt to improve their individual welfare by acquiring a combination of resources; an auctioneer looks at the entire system and allocates resources to the agents using a combinatorial algorithm to maximize an overall objective function (e.g., maximizing the system’s revenue or minimizing t...

A secure multi-item e-auction mechanism with bid privacy

The recent focus within the auction field has been multi-item auctions where bidders are not restricted to buying only one item of the merchandise. It has been of practical importance in Internet auction sites and has been widely executed by them. In this paper, we concentrate on the use of the multi-item auction for task assignment scenarios and propose a novel PUPA auction protocol to solve the problem of bid privacy in multi-item auctions. A verifiable technique of shared key chain is proposed to find the winners without revealing the losing bid and bidder’s privacy. It can be shown that our new scheme is robust against cheating bidders.

An Improved Efficient Electronic Marketplace Bidding Auction Protocol with Bid Privacy

We modified the multi-agent negotiation test-bed which was proposed by Collins et al. In 2004, Jaiswal et al. have modified Collins’s scheme, but Jaiswal’s scheme still has some security weaknesses: such as replay data attack and DOS (denial-of-service) attack, anonymity disclosure, collision between customers and a certain supplier. So the proposed protocol tries to reduce DOS attack and avoids replay data attack by providing ticket token and deal sequence number to the supplier. It utilizes efficient LPN-based authentication method to accomplish lightweight authentication. And it publishes an interpolating polynomial for sharing the determination process data and avoids collusion between a customer and a certain supplier. Also the proposed scheme relaxes the trust assumptions for three-party in Jaiswal’s scheme. According to comparison and analysis with other protocols, our proposed protocol shows good security and less computation cost.

Practical electronic auction scheme with strong anonymity and bidding privacy

In 2003, Chang and Chang proposed an efficient and anonymous auction protocol with freewheeling bids. They claimed that their scheme could ensure the bidders’ anonymity and secure confidentiality. Later, Jiang et al. pointed out that their scheme could not withstand the man-in-the-middle attacks; during this time, Jiang et al. proposed an improved scheme based on the scheme by Chang and Chang. In 2006, Chang and Chang proposed an anonymous auction scheme that was much more efficient than the abovementioned schemes. However, all of these three schemes were unable to achieve strong anonymity, bidding privacy, and secret bidding prices for sealed-bids. This article proposes a new scheme to resolve the above problems in which two managers and zero knowledge proof are used. The proposed scheme can be widely applied in any sensitive auction (e.g., auctions of cosmetics, medical services, etc.). Moreover, the proposed scheme also satisfies the following requirements: (1) bidding privacy, (2) strong anonymity, (3) secret bidding prices, (4) unforgeability, (5) verifiability, (6) non-repudiation, (7) traceability, (8) one-time registration and (9) easy revocation.

An agent-based English auction protocol using Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem for mobile commerce

Rapid development of the Internet and the extensive use of mobile phones have increased demand for mobile devices in Internet auctions. This trend is acting as an incentive to develop an auction model for mobile-based environment. Recently, Kuo-Hsuan Huang proposed a mobile auction agent model (MoAAM), which allows the bidders to participate in online auctions through a mobile agent. He used modular exponentiation operations in his method. As a result, the processing time for key generation, bidding, and verification were long. Thus, we propose to add the concept of Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem (ECC) onto MoAAM, because ECC has low computation amount and small key size, both of which will aid to increase the speed in generating keys, bidding, and verification. In terms of reduction of computation load on mobile devices and auction-manager server, the proposed method will make online auction system more efficient as well as more convenient to use. This paper mainly uses the English auction protocol as the key auction protocol. The protocol consists of four entities: Registration Manager (RM), Agent House (AH), Auction House (AUH), and Bidders (B). The Registration Manager registers and verifies Bidder identity. The Agent House manages the agents and assigns public transaction keys to Bidders. The Auction House provides a place for auction and maintains all necessary operations for a smooth online auction. Bidders are buyers who are interested in purchasing items at the auction. Our proposed method conforms to the requirements of an online auction protocol in terms of anonymity, traceability, no framing, unforgetability, non-repudiation, fairness, public verifiability, unlinkability among various auction rounds, linkability within a single auction round, efficiency of bidding, one-time registration, and easy revocation.

Quantum Secure Direct Communication and Quantum Sealed-Bid Auction with EPR Pairs

I present a new protocol for three-party quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) with a set of ordered M Einstein—Podolsky—Rosen (EPR) pairs. In the scheme, by performing two unitary operations and Bell state measurements, it is shown that the three legitimate parties can exchange their respective secret message simultaneously. Then I modify it for an experimentally feasible and secure quantum sealed-bid auction (QSBD) protocol. Furthermore, I also analyze the security of the protocol, and the scheme is proven to be secure against the intercept-and-resend attack, the disturbance attack and the entangled-and-measure attack.

A protocol for verification of an auction without revealing bid values

Auctions have been proposed for allocating computation resources for Cloud computing. However, many security issues exist with electronic auctions including insider trading, private information revelation, bid filtering, and auctioneers lying about auction results for their own profit. Privacy preserving auction protocols use cryptographic methods to keep losing bid values secret but many have no means of verifying their black box behaviour. This paper presents a protocol that allows participants to verify that an auction has run correctly without revealing bid values of other participants while increasing the robustness of the auction protocol.

Secure quantum sealed-bid auction with post-confirmation

A new secure quantum auction with post-confirmation is proposed, which is a direct application of the multi-particle super dense coding scheme to the auction problem. In this scheme all bidders use M groups n-particle GHZ states to represent their bids. Different from classical auction protocols and the previous secure quantum sealed-bid auction protocols, in the present scheme, by introducing a post-confirmation mechanism the honesty of the quantum sealed-bid auction is guaranteed, i.e., malicious bidders cannot collude with auctioneers. Also by sharing secret keys with the bidders the auctioneer could insure the anonymity of the bidders.