Privacy-Preserving English Auction Protocol with Round Efficiency

TL;DR

This paper introduces a privacy-preserving English auction protocol that ensures bidder anonymity, allows identity revelation under specific conditions, eliminates the need for blacklists, and improves round efficiency using a modified ring signature.

Contribution

It presents a novel auction protocol combining conditional privacy, blacklist-free operation, and enhanced round efficiency based on a modified ring signature scheme.

Findings

Ensures bidder anonymity with conditional identity reveal.

Reduces communication rounds compared to previous protocols.

Eliminates the need for maintaining a blacklist.

Abstract

A privacy-preserving English auction protocol with round efficiency based on a modified ring signature has been proposed in this paper. The proposed protocol has three appealing characteristic: First, it offers conditional privacy-preservation: on the one hand, the bidder is anonymous to the public, on the other hand, only the collaboration of auctioneer and registration manager can reveal the true identity of a malicious bidder. Second, it does not require to maintain a black list which records the evicted malicious bidders. Finally, it is efficient: it saves the communication round complexity comparing with previously proposed solutions.