Enabling Privacy-preserving Auctions in Big Data

TL;DR

This paper presents a privacy-preserving auction mechanism tailored for big data, addressing challenges of efficiency, scalability, and truthfulness, by introducing novel algorithms and cryptographic techniques to ensure secure, verifiable, and scalable data-based decision making.

Contribution

It proposes a new privacy-preserving auction framework for big data that improves scalability and efficiency while ensuring truthfulness and verifiability, using innovative algorithms and cryptographic methods.

Findings

Achieves linear and logarithmic overhead growth, significantly improving scalability.

Develops a novel winner determination algorithm for privacy-preserving auctions.

Employs a blind signature scheme for payment verification.

Abstract

We study how to enable auctions in the big data context to solve many upcoming data-based decision problems in the near future. We consider the characteristics of the big data including, but not limited to, velocity, volume, variety, and veracity, and we believe any auction mechanism design in the future should take the following factors into consideration: 1) generality (variety); 2) efficiency and scalability (velocity and volume); 3) truthfulness and verifiability (veracity). In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving construction for auction mechanism design in the big data, which prevents adversaries from learning unnecessary information except those implied in the valid output of the auction. More specifically, we considered one of the most general form of the auction (to deal with the variety), and greatly improved the the efficiency and scalability by approximating the NP-hard problems and avoiding the design based on garbled circuits (to deal with velocity and volume), and finally prevented stakeholders from lying to each other for their own benefit (to deal with the veracity). We achieve these by introducing a novel privacy-preserving winner determination algorithm and a novel payment mechanism. Additionally, we further employ a blind signature scheme as a building block to let bidders verify the authenticity of their payment reported by the auctioneer. The comparison with peer work shows that we improve the asymptotic performance of peer works' overhead from the exponential growth to a linear growth and from linear growth to a logarithmic growth, which greatly improves the scalability.