A practical english auction with one-time registration

Abstract

An English auction is the most familiar type of auctions. Generally, an electronic auction has mainly two entities, the registration manager(RM) who treats the registration of bidders, and the auction manager(AM) who holds auctions. Before starting an auction, a bidder who wants to participate in English auction is registered to RM with her/his information. An electronic English auction protocol should satisfy the following nine properties, (a)Anonymity, (b)Traceability, (c)No framing, (d)Unforgeability, (e)Fairness, (f)Verifiability, (g)Unlikability among different auctions, (h)Linkability in an auction, and (i)Efficiency of bidding. Furthermore from the practical point of view we add two properties (j)One-time registration and (k)Easy revocation. A group signature is adapted to an English auction in order to satisfy (a), (b), and (f)[18]. However such a direct adoption suffers from the most critical drawbacks of efficiency in group signatures. In this paper we propose more realistic electronic English auction scheme, which satisfies all of these properties. Four notable features of our scheme are: (1) both of bidding and verification of bids are done quite efficiently by introducing a bulletin board, (2) anonymity for RM, AM and any participant can be realized to plural auctions by only one-time registration, (3) RM can easily revoke a bidder, and (4) nobody can impersonate any bidder.