Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2017/1044
Strain: A Secure Auction for Blockchains
Erik-Oliver Blass and Florian Kerschbaum
Abstract: We present Strain, a new auction protocol running on top of
blockchains and guaranteeing bid confidentiality against
fully-malicious parties. As our goal is efficiency and low
blockchain latency, we abstain from using traditional, highly
interactive MPC primitives such as secret shares. We focus on a
slightly weaker adversary model than MPC which allows Strain to
achieve constant latency in both the number
of parties and the bid length. The main idea behind Strain is a new
maliciously-secure two-party comparison mechanism executed between
any pair of bids in parallel. Using zero-knowledge proofs, Strain
broadcasts the outcome of comparisons on the blockchain in a way
that all parties can verify each outcome. Strain's latency is not
only asymptotically optimal, but also efficient in practice,
requiring a total of just 4 blocks of the underlying blockchain. Strain provides typical auction
security requirements such as non-retractable bids against
fully-malicious adversaries.
Category / Keywords: applications /
Date: received 24 Oct 2017, last revised 18 Jun 2018
Contact author: erik-oliver blass at airbus com
Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation
Version: 20180618:150354 (All versions of this report)
Short URL: ia.cr/2017/1044
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