Secure vickrey auctions without threshold trust

Abstract

We argue that threshold trust is not an option in most of the real-life electronic auctions. We then propose two new cryptographic Vickrey auction schemes that involve, apart from the bidders and the seller S, an auction authority A so that unless S and A collude the outcome of auctions will be correct, and moreover, S will not get any information about the bids, while A will learn bid statistics. Further extensions make it possible to decrease damage that colluding S and A can do, and to construct (m + l)st price auction schemes. The communication complexity between the S and A in medium-size auctions is at least one order of magnitude less than in the Naor-Pinkas-Sumner scheme.