Pp. 61–74 of the Proceedings

Electronic Auctions with Private Bids

Abstract:

Auctions are a fundamental electronic commerce technology. We describe a set of protocols for performing sealed-bid electronic auctions which preserve the privacy of the submitted bids using a form of secure distributed computation. Bids are never revealed to any party, even after the auction is completed. Both first-price and second-price (Vickrey) auctions are supported, and the computational costs of the methods are low enough to allow their use in many real-world auction situations.

• Introduction
  • Auction Types
  • Secret computation
• A simple auction method
• Secure distributed computation
• A scalable secret-bid second-price auction
  • Bid submission
    • Incorrect bids
  • Bid resolution
    • Phase 1: Determining the digits of the bids
    • Phase 2: Determining the digit of the selling price
    • Phase 3: Updating control values u and w
  • Determining the winning bidder
    • Breaking ties
  • A sample auction
  • Efficiency
    • Costs for protocol phases
    • Example costs
    • Asymptotic efficiency
  • Accountability
    • Deposits
    • Bidder accountability
    • Auctioneer accountability
    • Anonymity
  • Passive attacks
  • Error analysis
• Open Problems
• References
• About this document ...