Blockchain Based M+1st-Price Auction With Exponential Bid Upper Bound
Po-Chu Hsu, Atsuko Miyaji · IEEE Access · 2023
An auction is commonly used to sell limited resources in modern society.M+ 1st-price auction sellsMidentical goods toBbidders. The topMwinners can buy the goods at theM+1st-price. Each bidder sends their bids secretly as a bit-slice bidding vector to a trusted manager. Bit-slice is commonly used to compare secret values without revealing them. However, the bit-slice bidding vector also limits the upper bound of a bid as the length of the bidding vector. A binary format bidding vector was proposed to increase the bid upper bound to an exponential scale. For example, given a bidding vector with length 32, a binary format bidding vector can increase the bid upper bound from 32 to 232. However, previous protocols that use binary format bidding vectors require a somewhat homomorphic encryption (SHE) and a trusted manager. To make sure no party except the bidder itself knows its bid, our protocol does not have any managers. Instead, each bidder interacts with the Smart Contract independently. We propose a zero-knowledge proof that allows our protocol only requires partially homomorphic encryption such as an ElGamal encryption. To our best knowledge, our protocol is the first secureM+ 1st-price auction protocol that can reach an exponential bid upper bound without a manager and SHE.