Enabling Privacy-preserving Auctions in Big Data

We study how to enable auctions in the big data context to solve many upcoming data-based decision problems in the near future. We consider the characteristics of the big data including, but not limited to, velocity, volume, variety, and veracity, and we believe any auction mechanism design in the future should take the following factors into consideration: 1) generality (variety); 2) efficiency and scalability (velocity and volume); 3) truthfulness and verifiability (veracity). In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving construction for auction mechanism design in the big data, which prevents adversaries from learning unnecessary information except those implied in the valid output of the auction. More specifically, we considered one of the most general form of the auction (to deal with the variety), and greatly improved the the efficiency and scalability by approximating the NP-hard problems and avoiding the design based on garbled circuits (to deal with velocity and volume), and finally prevented stakeholders from lying to each other for their own benefit (to deal with the veracity). We achieve these by introducing a novel privacy-preserving winner determination algorithm and a novel payment mechanism. Additionally, we further employ a blind signature scheme as a building block to let bidders verify the authenticity of their payment reported by the auctioneer. The comparison with peer work shows that we improve the asymptotic performance of peer works' overhead from the exponential growth to a linear growth and from linear growth to a logarithmic growth, which greatly improves the scalability

PS-TRUST: Provably Secure Solution for Truthful Double Spectrum Auctions

Truthful spectrum auctions have been extensively studied in recent years. Truthfulness makes bidders bid their true valuations, simplifying greatly the analysis of auctions. However, revealing one's true valuation causes severe privacy disclosure to the auctioneer and other bidders. To make things worse, previous work on secure spectrum auctions does not provide adequate security. In this paper, based on TRUST, we propose PS-TRUST, a provably secure solution for truthful double spectrum auctions. Besides maintaining the properties of truthfulness and special spectrum reuse of TRUST, PS-TRUST achieves provable security against semi-honest adversaries in the sense of cryptography. Specifically, PS-TRUST reveals nothing about the bids to anyone in the auction, except the auction result. To the best of our knowledge, PS-TRUST is the first provably secure solution for spectrum auctions. Furthermore, experimental results show that the computation and communication overhead of PS-TRUST is modest, and its practical applications are feasible.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Infocom 201