5 research outputs found
A Sealed-bid Auction with Fund Binding: Preventing Maximum Bidding Price Leakage
In an open-bid auction, a bidder can know the budgets of other bidders. Thus,
a sealed-bid auction that hides bidding prices is desirable. However, in
previous sealed-bid auction protocols, it has been difficult to provide a
``fund binding'' property, which would guarantee that a bidder has funds more
than or equal to the bidding price and that the funds are forcibly withdrawn
when the bidder wins. Thus, such protocols are vulnerable to false bidding. As
a solution, many protocols employ a simple deposit method in which each bidder
sends a deposit to a smart contract, which is greater than or equal to the
bidding price, before the bidding phase. However, this deposit reveals the
maximum bidding price, and it is preferable to hide this information.
In this paper, we propose a sealed-bid auction protocol that provides a fund
binding property. Our protocol not only hides the bidding price and a maximum
bidding price, but also provides fund binding, simultaneously. For hiding the
maximum bidding price, we pay attention to the fact that usual Ethereum
transactions and transactions for sending funds to a one-time address have the
same transaction structure, and it seems that they are indistinguishable. We
discuss how much bidding transactions are hidden. We also employ DECO (Zhang et
al,. CCS 2020) that proves the validity of the data to a verifier in which the
data are taken from a source without showing the data itself. Finally, we give
our implementation which shows transaction fees required and compare it to a
sealed-bid auction protocol employing the simple deposit method
Integration of Blockchain and Auction Models: A Survey, Some Applications, and Challenges
In recent years, blockchain has gained widespread attention as an emerging
technology for decentralization, transparency, and immutability in advancing
online activities over public networks. As an essential market process,
auctions have been well studied and applied in many business fields due to
their efficiency and contributions to fair trade. Complementary features
between blockchain and auction models trigger a great potential for research
and innovation. On the one hand, the decentralized nature of blockchain can
provide a trustworthy, secure, and cost-effective mechanism to manage the
auction process; on the other hand, auction models can be utilized to design
incentive and consensus protocols in blockchain architectures. These
opportunities have attracted enormous research and innovation activities in
both academia and industry; however, there is a lack of an in-depth review of
existing solutions and achievements. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive
state-of-the-art survey of these two research topics. We review the existing
solutions for integrating blockchain and auction models, with some
application-oriented taxonomies generated. Additionally, we highlight some open
research challenges and future directions towards integrated blockchain-auction
models