Quantum and semi-quantum sealed-bid auction: Vulnerabilities and advantages

TL;DR

This paper critically analyzes existing quantum sealed-bid auction protocols, identifies their vulnerabilities, and proposes a semi-quantum protocol that enhances security while requiring minimal quantum resources from bidders.

Contribution

It reveals vulnerabilities in current protocols and introduces a semi-quantum auction protocol that is secure against various attacks.

Findings

Existing protocols are vulnerable to participant, non-participant, and collusion attacks.

Bounds on eavesdropper success probability are established.

The proposed semi-quantum protocol is secure against identified vulnerabilities.

Abstract

A family of existing protocols for quantum sealed-bid auction is critically analyzed, and it is shown that they are vulnerable under several attacks (e.g., the participant's and non-participant's attacks as well as the collusion attack of participants) and some of the claims made in these works are not correct. We obtained the bounds on the success probability of an eavesdropper in accessing the sealed-bids. Further, realizing the role of secure sealed-bid auction in the reduction of corruption, a new protocol for sealed-bid auction is proposed which is semi-quantum in nature, where the bidders do not have quantum resources but they can perform classical operations on the quantum states. The security of the proposed protocol is established against a set of attacks, and thus it is established that the proposed protocol is free from the vulnerabilities reported here in the context of the existing protocols.