Secure Schemes for an On-Line Auction Service

Abstract

In this paper we construct secure on-line auction schemes suitable for English auction. This paper uses a self-certified public key cryptosystem so that the system authority cannot impersonate any legal bidder. Moreover, the auction chairman cannot know who joins the auction since bidders join it with pseudonym for anonymity. For the considerations of efficiency, the schemes are developed by using elliptic curve cryptosystems instead of modular exponentiation, because it possesses faster computation and fewer bits achieving the same security degree as other public key cryptosystems. In this paper, we design several security schemes in an on-line auction environment using the self-certified public key cryptosystem based on elliptic curve cryptosystems. The proposed schemes make the on-line auction securely workable.