Practical Trustworthy Sealed-Bid Auctions in Wireless Networks

Auctions conducted via wireless devices have promoted trade worth trillions of dollars globally. Their potential market share and crucial role in resource allocation make them an appealing research topic. However, sealed-bid auctions are usually considered high-risk behaviors for bidders due to their unequal status, dependence on auctioneers, and lack of transparency during an auction. In order to meet these requirements for confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data and reduce communication complexity between wireless devices, in this article, we propose a trustworthy sealed-bid auction protocol in wireless networks with low communication costs. Specifically, the protocol adopts cryptographic techniques such as commitment and zero-knowledge proofs to ensure the validity of bids and the credibility of auction results. Inner-product arguments of vectors and proof of aggregation are employed to reduce communication costs of the proposal. The protocol guarantees the continuous verification of submitted data throughout the process (before, during, and at the end) of an auction so as to grant admission to network resources. We show that the proposed protocol satisfies privacy protection, public verifiability, fairness, and non-repudiation of bidders and auctioneers. In addition, our construction is generic, and the protocol can be extended to ordinal-price sealed-bid auctions. The time consumption evaluated in the implementation indicates the feasibility of the protocol in real-world applications.