Cryptographic Protocols for Sealed-Bid Auctions Without Trusted Servers

Abstract

Sealed-bid auctions are a kind of auctions that bidders send their sealed bidding prices to the auctioneer and the auctioneer opens all bids to determine the winner and the winning bid. In this paper, we propose a novel construction on the secure computation of the greaterthan function. This idea is applied to the two-party private bidding and sealed-bid auction protocols. Our protocols require no trusted servers. In the private bidding protocol, it needs two rounds of communication between the bidders. In the auction protocol, a public bulletin board is used. It takes two or three rounds of communication between the bidders and the board. After the execution of our protocols, no bid information is revealed to any party.