Paper 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.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Applications
- Publication info
- Preprint. MINOR revision.
- Contact author(s)
- erik-oliver blass @ airbus com
- History
- 2018-06-18: last of 4 revisions
- 2017-10-28: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2017/1044
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2017/1044,
author = {Erik-Oliver Blass and Florian Kerschbaum},
title = {Strain: A Secure Auction for Blockchains},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2017/1044},
year = {2017},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1044}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1044}
}
