A secure and efficient protocol for electronic treasury auctions

Abstract

Auctions have become an important part of electronic commerce. Considering the gradually increasing importance of confidentiality and privacy in auction modeling, various designs have been proposed to ensure secure transmission especially in sealed-bid auctions. However, to the best of our knowledge there is no secure and privacy preserving Treasury Auction system. Looking at systems currently in use, many countries perform those auctions manually. Since all the bids are transferred to the system in clear form, confidentiality and privacy are not guaranteed. Therefore, the system is more vulnerable to potential threats especially due to the ongoing advances and developments in technology. In a secure electronic auction system, it is possible to determine the winner or the winners without revealing any private information. In this work, we propose a new, secure and efficient electronic auction protocol for Treasury Auctions based on secure multi-party computation, secret sharing and threshold homomorphic cryptosystem.