A sealed-bid multi-attribute auction protocol with strong bid privacy and bidder privacy

In this paper, a sealed-bid multi-attribute auction protocol that mainly focuses on security issues (i.e., bid privacy, bidder anonymity, and fairness problem) is presented. In recent years, existing literatures mainly focus on the multi-attribute winner determination problem and other issues, but research of multi-attribute e-auction just begin from the perspective of information security. The new proposal is motivated by the conflict between bidder anonymity and denial-of-service attack from an insider. It utilizes private set intersection method to solve the privacy problem of winner determination of sealed-bid multi-attribute auction. The proposed sealed-bid auction scheme preserves the strong privacy of the bids and provides verifiable correctness. According to the security analysis, it satisfies the security requirements of an e-auction. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.