Blockchain-based distributive auction for relay-assisted secure communications

Physical layer security (PLS) is considered as a promising technique to prevent information eavesdropping in wireless systems. In this context, cooperative relaying has emerged as a robust solution for achieving PLS due to multipath diversity and relatively lower transmission power. However, relays or the relay operators in the practical environment are unwilling for service provisioning unless they are incentivized for their cost of services. Thus, it is required to jointly consider network economics and relay cooperation to improve system efficiency. In this paper, we consider the problem of joint network economics and PLS using cooperative relaying and jamming. Based on the double auction theory, we model the interaction between transmitters seeking for a particular level of secure transmission of information and relay operators for suitable relay and jammer assignment, in a multiple source-destination networks. In addition, theoretical analyses are presented to justify that the proposed auction mechanism satisfies the desirable economic properties of individual rationality, budget balance, and truthfulness. As the participants in the traditional centralized auction framework may take selfish actions or collude with each other, we propose a decentralized and trustless auction framework based on blockchain technology. In particular, we exploit the smart contract feature of blockchain to construct a completely autonomous framework, where all the participants are financially enforced by smart contract terms. The security properties of the proposed framework are also discussed

Secure Second Price Auctions with a Rational Auctioneer

We present novel security requirements for second price auctions and a simple, efficient and practical protocol that provably maintains these requirements. Novel requirements are needed because commonly used requirements, such as the indistinguishability-based secrecy requirement of encryption schemes presented by (Goldwasser and Micali, 1982), do not fit properly in the second price auctions context. Additionally, the presented protocol uses a trustworthy supervisor that checks if the auctioneer deviated from the protocol and fines him accordingly. By making sure the expected utility of the auctioneer when deviating from the protocol is lower than his expected utility when abiding by the protocol we ascertain that a rational auctioneer will abide by the protocol. This allows the supervisor to optimize by performing (computationally-intensive) inspections of the auctioneer with only low probability.