### Secret, verifiable auctions from elections

Elizabeth A. Quaglia and Ben Smyth

##### Abstract

Auctions and elections are seemingly disjoint. Nevertheless, similar cryptographic primitives are used in both domains. For instance, mixnets, homomorphic encryption and trapdoor bit-commitments have been used by state-of-the-art schemes in both domains. These developments have appeared independently. For example, the adoption of mixnets in elections preceded a similar adoption in auctions by over two decades. In this paper, we demonstrate a relation between auctions and elections: we present a generic construction for auctions from election schemes. Moreover, we show that the construction guarantees secrecy and verifiability, assuming the underlying election scheme satisfies analogous security properties. We demonstrate the applicability of our work by deriving auction schemes from the Helios family of election schemes. Our results advance the unification of auctions and elections, thereby facilitating the progression of both domains.

Available format(s)
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Theoretical Computer Science
Keywords
Auctionselectionsprivacysecrecyverifiability.
Contact author(s)
research @ bensmyth com
History
2018-03-28: last of 5 revisions
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2015/1204

CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2015/1204,
author = {Elizabeth A.  Quaglia and Ben Smyth},
title = {Secret, verifiable auctions from elections},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2015/1204},
year = {2015},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1204}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1204}
}

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