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Verifiable Sealed-Bid Auction on the Ethereum Blockchain

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 10958))

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Abstract

The success of the Ethereum blockchain as a decentralized application platform with a distributed consensus protocol has made many organizations start to invest into running their business on top of it. Technically, the most impressive feature behind the success of Ethereum is its support for a Turing complete language. On the other hand, the inherent transparency and, consequently, the lack of privacy poses a great challenge for many financial applications. In this paper, we tackle this challenge and present a smart contract for a verifiable sealed-bid auction on the Ethereum blockchain. In a nutshell, initially, the bidders submit homomorphic commitments to their sealed-bids on the contract. Subsequently, they reveal their commitments secretly to the auctioneer via a public key encryption scheme. Then, according to the auction rules, the auctioneer determines and claims the winner of the auction. Finally, we utilize interactive zero-knowledge proof protocols between the smart contract and the auctioneer to verify the correctness of such a claim. The underlying protocol of the proposed smart contract is partially privacy-preserving. To be precise, no information about the losing bids is leaked to the bidders. We provide an analysis of the proposed protocol and the smart contract design, in addition to the estimated gas costs associated with the different transactions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/HSG88/AuctionContract.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering, Concordia University, Montréal, QC, Canada

    Hisham S. Galal & Amr M. Youssef

Authors
  1. Hisham S. Galal
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  2. Amr M. Youssef
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hisham S. Galal .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

    Aviv Zohar

  2. Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

    Ittay Eyal

  3. University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

    Vanessa Teague

  4. Concordia University, Beaconsfield, QC, Canada

    Jeremy Clark

  5. Computer Science and Mathematics, Stirling University, Stirling, UK

    Andrea Bracciali

  6. Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Federico Pintore

  7. Department of Mathematics, University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Massimiliano Sala

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© 2019 International Financial Cryptography Association

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Galal, H.S., Youssef, A.M. (2019). Verifiable Sealed-Bid Auction on the Ethereum Blockchain. In: Zohar, A., et al. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10958. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-58820-8_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-58820-8_18

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-58819-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-58820-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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