A Single Server-based Secure Electronic Sealed-Bid Auction Method

摘要

This paper presents a new method to securely conduct online sealed-bid auctions with a single auctioneer server. The sealed-bid auctions have several vulnerable security problems when they are performed on Internet One of such problems is the trust establishment between an auctioneer and bidders who participate in an auction. Several online sealed-bid auction methods have been developed that employ either a trusted third party or multiple bidding managers to solve such problems. Such methods either require unconditional belief in the trusted third party or require other authorities along with an auctioneer. The proposed method does not require any third party or multiple bidding managers. It solves the security problems that would happen in the sealed-bid auction using some security protocols. It prevents the auctioneer from illegally manipulating the bidders' bidding information, repudiating the reception of some bid, manipulating the auction period, and illegally adding or deleting bids. In addition, it keeps the bidders from modifying the bidding information after issuing their bid and doing intentional mistake to invalidate their own bid. The method can be easily implemented using the multiagent architecture.