DESIGN ISSUES FOR ELECTRONIC AUCTIONS
Jarrod Trevathan and Wayne Read
School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences
James Cook University
Hossein Ghodosi
School of Information Technology
James Cook University
Keywords:
Auction security, anonymity, authentication, price determination, payment enforcement, group signatures.
Abstract:
Extensive research has been conducted in order to improve the security and efficiency of electronic auctions.
However, little attention has been paid to the design issues. This paper discusses design issues and contrasts
the differing security requirements between various auction types. We demonstrate that poor design for an
electronic auction breaches the security of the system and degrades its practicality, irrespective of how se-
cure/efficient the building blocks of an electronic auction are. This is accomplished by illustrating design
flaws in several existing electronic auction schemes. Furthermore, we provide a solution to these flaws using
a group signature scheme and give recommendations for sound auction design.
1 INTRODUCTION
An auction is an exchange mechanism whereby a
seller (or sellers) offers an item for sale and many
bidders submit bids in competition for the item. The
Auctioneer organises the auction on behalf of the
seller and accepts bids from the bidders. The Auc-
tioneer attempts to maximise the sale price for the
seller, whereas the bidders try to win the item for the
lowest price possible. An electronic auction is a cryp-
tographic protocol designed to securely and anony-
mously conduct auctions. While extensive research
has been undertaken for improving the security and
efficiency of electronic auctions, (see (Cachin, 1999;
Franklin and Reiter, 1996; Kikuchi et al., 1998; Naor
et al., 1999; Trevathan, 2005)), little attention has
been paid to the design issues. In this paper we
demonstrate that poor design for an electronic auc-
tion breaches the security of the system and degrades
its practicality regardless of how secure/efficient the
building blocks of an electronic auction are. This
is accomplished by illustrating design flaws in sev-
eral existing auction schemes. We also provide solu-
tions to these flaws using a group signature scheme
and give some recommendations for sound auction
design.
This paper is organised as follows: Section 2 gives
a general background on electronic auction schemes.
Section 3 describes the security problems inherent in
conducting electronic auctions. Section 4 discusses
design issues and illustrates some major design flaws
in several existing schemes. Section 5 gives some rec-
ommendations about how these flaws can be fixed and
suggestions regarding good auction design principles.
Section 6 provides some concluding remarks.
2 TYPES OF AUCTIONS
There are many types of auctions, including English,
Vickrey, Dutch, and Continuous Double auctions (see
Figure 2). An English auction is the most prominently
known type of auction and is commonly used in real
estate. In this auction there is one seller who offers an
item for sale. Many potential buyers submit bids in
an attempt to win the item. The winner is the highest
bidder after a given time-out period.
An alternative to this is the Vickrey auction. This
is referred to as a sealed bid, second price auction.
It is comprised of bidders submitting their bids se-
cretly during a bid submission round. The bids remain
sealed until a winner determination round, where the
Auctioneer views all of the bids and awards the auc-
tion to the highest bidder. In this auction, the win-
ner only has to pay the second highest price, i.e., the
highest losing bid. The values of all other losing bids
remain secret. In contrast, an English auction is an
open bid, first price auction.
340
Trevathan J., Read W. and Ghodosi H. (2005).
DESIGN ISSUES FOR ELECTRONIC AUCTIONS.
In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on e-Business and Telecommunication Networks, pages 340-347
DOI: 10.5220/0001419103400347
Copyright
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single double
sealed open
ascending descending
Vickrey English Dutch CDA
Figure 1: Taxonomy of Electronic Auction Schemes
In a Dutch or descending auction, the seller pro-
gressively lowers his/her bid until a buyer accepts.
The winner is the first buyer to accept the seller’s of-
fer. They must pay an amount equal to this bid. In
this respect Dutch auctions have the natural property
of concealing the losing bid values. This form of auc-
tioning is also referred to as descending, as unlike an
English auction, the winning price is bid downwards
rather than up.
A further style of auction used in share markets is
a Continuous Double Auction (CDA). The aforemen-
tioned auctions have only one seller and many buyers.
CDAs on the other hand, have many buyers and many
sellers who continuously trade a particular commod-
ity. These auctions are open bid and the price can be
either ascending or descending.
Electronic auction schemes have been proposed for
all of these auction types. However, regardless of the
auctioning mechanism, all schemes consist of the fol-
lowing stages:
Initialisation: The Auctioneer sets up the auction and
advertises it (i.e., description of good, starting time,
etc).
Registration: In order to participate in the auction,
bidders must first register with the Auctioneer (or a
registration manager). This ensures only valid bids
are made and bidders can be identified for payment
purposes. It is desirable for registration to be a one-
off procedure. When a bidder has registered they are
able to participate in any number of auctions rather
than re-registering for each new auction.
Bidding: A registered bidder computes his/her bid
and submits it to the Auctioneer. The Auctioneer
checks the bid received to ensure conformity with the
auction rules.
Winner Determination: The Auctioneer determines
the winner according to the auction rules. It is desir-
able for this process to be publicly verifiable.
3 AUCTION SECURITY
In recent years, many companies have emerged offer-
ing auctioning services via the Internet (e.g., eBay
1
and onSale
2
). Such sites lack security for both the
seller and the bidder and moreover require all parties
to trust the Auctioneer. Furthermore, the identities
and information relating to the participants is open to
abuse. Common problems identified include: the bid-
ders repudiating bids (i.e., they win and later decide
they don’t want to pay), the seller not delivering the
item and Auctioneer corruption by awarding the auc-
tion to someone other then the legitimate winner.
Security and anonymity has been addressed in
literature by (Cachin, 1999; Franklin and Reiter,
1996; Kikuchi et al., 1998; Naor et al., 1999;
Trevathan, 2005). Additionally, numerous auction
schemes have been proposed in an attempt to solve
the aforementioned problems. There are differing
security requirements depending on whether the
auction is sealed or open bid. However, in general,
most schemes in literature agree on the following
security goals:
Unforgeability - Bid must be unforgeable, otherwise
a bidder can be impersonated.
Non-Repudiation - Once a bidder has submitted a
bid they must not be able to repudiate having made
it. For example, if a bidder wins and does not want to
pay they might deny that they submitted the bid.
Anonymity - The bidder-bid relationship must be
1
http://www.ebay.com
2
http://www.onsale.com
DESIGN ISSUES FOR ELECTRONIC AUCTIONS
341
concealed so that no bidder can be associated with the
bid they submit.
Public Verifiability - There must be publicly avail-
able information by which all parties can be veri-
fied as having correctly followed the auction protocol.
This should include evidence of registration, bidding
and proof of winner/loser.
Robustness - The auction process must not be af-
fected by invalid bids nor by participants not follow-
ing the auction protocol correctly.
4 DESIGN ISSUES
The main design goals discussed previously in the lit-
erature of electronic auctions include fairness, effi-
cient registration, efficient bidding, and efficient win-
ner determination (see, for example, (Boyd and Mao,
2000; Franklin and Reiter, 1996; Naor et al., 1999;
Boyd et al., 2000; Trevathan, 2005)). Our observation
is that despite all components of an electronic auction
functioning correctly, there is still no guarantee that
the whole system works properly. In this section we
discuss several design issues that must be considered
in order to achieve a practical auction system.
4.1 Trust Issues
Auctioneer corruption is a major problem in elec-
tronic auctions. A malicious Auctioneer might influ-
ence the auction proceedings in a manner inconsis-
tent with the auction rules. For example, the Auction-
eer might choose to block bids, insert fake bids, steal
payments, profile bidders, open sealed bids prior to
the winner determination phase, or award the item to
someone other than the legitimate winner. Further-
more, the Auctioneer may be in collusion with some
of the bidders.
In general, all schemes can be classified according
to how they deal with this problem. We have identi-
fied the following trust models:
Auctioneer Trust - This is the easiest (and the most
unacceptable) solution to the problem. It is assumed
that the Auctioneer is trustworthy and honestly
follows the protocol. This is the strategy employed
by all Internet auction sites as it easily solves many
relevant problems (e.g., security, anonymity, etc.).
However, all bidders are at the mercy of the company
running the auction.
Trusted Third Party - Since the Auctioneer is a
beneficiary, the assumption that it follows the auction
protocol is unrealistic. An alternative could be that
the bidders and Auctioneer provide a trusted third
party (TTP) with information so that when there is a
dispute the TTP can be called upon to resolve it (see
(Boyd et al., 2000)). However, such a setup requires
all parties to have confidence in the TTP who is an
attractive security target and a bottleneck.
Threshold Trust - Threshold trust schemes protect
against a corrupt Auctioneer by distributing the role
of the Auctioneer across servers (see (Franklin and
Reiter, 1996; Sakurai and Miyazaki, 1999)). The auc-
tion can be considered secure/fair unless a threshold
t, 1 t of the Auctioneers collude. The value of
t is usually around ℓ/3.
Such a scheme is clearly better then the previous
approaches as no single party acting maliciously can
influence the auction proceedings. However, thresh-
old trust requires much communication between
bidders and the auction servers, as well as between
the auction servers themselves. Furthermore, when
the auctioning company is small, collusion among
Auctioneers is beneficial to the group as a whole.
Two-Server Trust - An alternative approach to
threshold trust is to split the auctioning responsibility
among two servers owned by separate entities (see
(Cachin, 1999; Naor et al., 1999)). Here the auction
result can be trusted as long as the two entities do
not collude. Two-server trust schemes effectively
reduce the communication overhead involved in
threshold trust schemes and thus far have proven
to be computationally efficient. However, if one of
the two servers decides not to co-operate, then the
auction outcome cannot be determined.
Distributed Trust - In this approach the bidders
jointly calculate the auction result without the help
of an Auctioneer. The merit of such an approach is
that collusion amongst bidders is prevented unless all
bidders are corrupt, which negates the reason for col-
luding in the first place (see (Brandt, 2003)).
Distributed trust schemes are unrealistic as they re-
quire all bidders to participate during the winner de-
termination phase. Such an approach is not feasible
when the number of bidders is large. Furthermore,
distributed trust is not applicable to CDAs as this as-
sumes knowledge of the total number of bidders prior
to the start of bidding. In a CDA, new bidders are
entering the auction all the time. Using a distributed
bidder approach would require communicating new
information to all the auction participants every time
a new bidder registers.
4.2 Anonymity Issues
Another important criteria for the evaluation of secure
electronic protocols is anonymity. This is important
because the bidder-bid relationship must be concealed
in such a way that no bidder can be associated with the
ICETE 2005 - SECURITY AND RELIABILITY IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND NETWORKS
342
bid they have submitted. There are several different
approaches to satisfy this requirement. For example,
auction protocols which utilise secure computation
for winner determination (e.g., (Kikuchi et al., 1998;
Harkavy et al., 1998) provide this facility by conceal-
ing the identity of bidders in their bids). A common
solution is to issue bidders with a pseudonym (during
registration), which they can use to submit bids. That
is, bidders register themselves (by presenting verified
identification) and obtain a pseudonym.
Seemingly the technique of issuing pseudonyms
requires having more than one server/party on the
auction side. Otherwise, the same party issuing
the pseudonym knows the real identity of the asso-
ciated bidder, and thus learns the relationship be-
tween the bids and the bidders. On the contrary, if
the pseudonym issuer does not know the pseudonym
(e.g., it is issued by blindly signing a message), then it
cannot retrieve the real identity of a bidder in the case
of a dispute. This model essentially works as follows
(assume the two servers/parties are called S
1
and S
2
):
1. Bidders present their identification to S
1
and obtain
a token that does not carry their ID.
2. Bidders submit the token (without revealing their
ID) to S
2
, who issues a pseudonym associated with
the token.
In this way, neither S
1
nor S
2
knows the relation-
ship between any real ID and the pseudonyms. The
bidder then submits his/her bid using the pseudonym.
However, in the event of a dispute S
1
and S
2
can co-
operate to determine the real ID associated with each
pseudonym.
Our observation is that, regardless of how se-
cure the anonymity issuing protocol is, the resulting
scheme is not secure if there is no separation between
the registration and the bidding phases. That is, the
registration must be performed for all bidders prior to
the commencement of bidding and the system must
not accept any bid before the registration is closed.
The following scenario explains a possible attack: A
bidder provides identification to S
1
and obtains a to-
ken. Using this token, it obtains a pseudonym which
can be used for bidding. If there is no separation
between the registration and bidding phases S
1
can
act in a procrastinating manner by halting all future
registrations until the newly registered bidder sub-
mits his/her bid. This scenario enables S
1
to learn
the mapping between the bidder’s identity and his/her
pseudonym. To protect against this type of attack, the
scheme should not allow any bidding prior to the reg-
istration closing time.
Note that there are electronic auction schemes in
which it is impossible to have a separation between
the registration and the bidding phases. For example,
a CDA allows bidders to continuously submit bids at
the same time new bidders are being registered (i.e.,
the registration and bidding phases overlap). There-
fore the scheme by Wang and Leung (Wang and Le-
ung, 2004) can be broken using this procrastinating
attack.
4.3 Bid Authentication Issues
Efficient winner determination is an important crite-
ria in the evaluation of electronic auction protocols.
Because of its importance, many schemes provide ev-
idence to support their claims regarding the ability of
their system to efficiently process bids. For example,
(Franklin and Reiter, 1996) in their highly referenced
work, claim that:
“We have implemented a prototype of our ser-
vice to demonstrate its feasibility. The perfor-
mance of this implementation indicates that our
approach is feasible using off-the-shelf worksta-
tions for auction servers, even for large auctions
involving hundreds of bids.
The question is, what will happen if a (set of) ma-
licious bidder(s) issues too many bids? Optimisti-
cally assuming that processing each bid takes only
one second, then the winner determination process
will require a proportional amount of time (i.e., the
system is not practical). The problem is more crucial
in schemes which use secure computation (see, e.g.,
(Kikuchi et al., 1998)). They achieve anonymity by
concealing the identity of bidders in their bids. In ad-
dition, all bids are submitted anonymously. The win-
ner determination protocol opens only one bid –a bid
that contains the highest offer. If there is a tie (i.e.,
more than one bid at the highest offer), then another
round of bidding must occur. A malicious bidder can
easily cause a never ending scenario in this scheme.
For example, even if all high valued bids are opened
(which is disallowed by the protocol), the Auctioneer
cannot determine who has submitted the bid as it con-
tains a false identity. Obviously, such schemes are not
practical at all.
This problem can be avoided if the bids have
been authenticated. That is, the Auctioneer accepts
bids only from registered bidders (generally, in
all sealed-bid auctions, each bidder submits only
one bid). If the system supports anonymity of the
bidders, then it must also provide the authentication
of the corresponding pseudonym. Note that there
are schemes which check the validity of the bids
(i.e., they check whether the submitted bid satisfies
a predetermined structure). This is insufficient,
as one may submit too many well-structured bids.
Furthermore, bid authentication must be secure about
relevant attacks. In order to illustrate the problem,
let us examine the protocol by (Boyd et al., 2000),
which supports a sealed bid auction system. This
is possibly the only auction scheme which uses bid
DESIGN ISSUES FOR ELECTRONIC AUCTIONS
343
Table 1: The Sealing Protocol
Bidder Auctioneer
a, d
1
, d
2
R
Z
q
S = g
b
1
g
a
2
, B = g
d
1
1
g
d
2
2
S,B
c
c
R
Z
q
s
1
= d
1
cx
1
, s
2
= d
2
cx
2
t
1
= s
1
bc, t
2
= s
2
ac
t
1
,t
2
B
?
= (Sy
1
y
2
)
c
g
t
1
1
g
t
2
2
authentication. But, as we will show shortly, it is
subject to an impersonation attack.
System Settings in (Boyd et al., 2000) -
G is a subgroup of order q in Z
p
, such that p = 2q +1
for sufficiently large prime p. There are two gener-
ators, g
1
, and g
2
, such that nobody knows log
g
1
g
2
.
The public keys of a bidder b
i
are certified to be
y
1
= g
x
1
1
and y
2
= g
x
2
2
.
Sealing Protocol in (Boyd et al., 2000) -
This is an interactive protocol between the bidder
and the Auctioneer. At the end of this protocol,
the Auctioneer will be convinced that the bidder
submitted a correct bid which can be opened at the
bid-opening phase (in their scheme, the help of the
bidder is necessary to open the bid). A bidder, b
1
,
with public keys y
1
= g
x
1
1
and y
2
= g
x
2
2
wishes
to commit himself/herself to the bid value b. The
protocol has three steps and works as shown in
Table 1.
To open the bid (at the bid-opening phase) the bid-
der should release the tuples (b, a). This tuple can
be checked with corresponding values at the bid seal-
ing protocol, and upon verification, the value b is
the bid submitted by bidder b
1
. If a bidder refrains
from opening his/her bid (e.g., when he/she learns
that his/her bid is too much higher than the others),
the identity of this person can be traced and suitable
action will be taken. The idea behind this protocol is
that the tuple (S, B, c, t
1
, t
2
) is unique, and thus the
bidder is committed to the bid value b. The authors
also proposed a non-interactive version of this proto-
col (see (Boyd et al., 2000)).
Anyone that does not know the secret keys x
1
and
x
2
, cannot participate in, and complete the proto-
col successfully. The impersonation attack works as
shown in Table 2 (the non-interactive version is also
subject to this attack).
The consequence of this attack is that an innocent
bidder b
1
will be accused of not participating in the
bid opening protocol. But, in fact, nobody knows the
relevant tuple (b, a) for this case (if solving the Dis-
Table 2: The Sealing Protocol by a Malicious Bidder
Bidder Auctioneer
t
1
, t
2
R
Z
q
S =
1
y
1
y
2
, B = g
t
1
1
g
t
2
2
S,B
c
c
R
Z
q
t
1
,t
2
B
?
= (Sy
1
y
2
)
c
g
t
1
1
g
t
2
2
crete Logarithm problem is hard).
4.4 Price Determination Issues
Many auction schemes impose a price list on bidders
(e.g., (Harkavy et al., 1998; Sakurai and Miyazaki,
1999)). This is essentially a series of bidding points
(w
1
, w
2
, ..., w
k
) where w
1
< w
2
< ... < w
k
which a
bidder must choose from.
The scheme by (Harkavy et al., 1998) requires bid-
ders to submit a bid value for each point in the price
list. Meaning, for each point in the price list, a bid-
der must either bid his/her id or a nullifying value.
For a price list of size k, this requires a bidder to sub-
mit k individual values. In some types of auctions
(such as CDAs), a price list may be too restrictive as
bidders require flexibility in choosing their bid. In
some instances this may be down to fractions of cents.
Adding more bidding points comes at the cost of in-
creased computation and communication overhead.
So the question here is what is the correct value of
k to choose?
Moreover, two colluding bidders can continually
bid at the highest price level and cause infinite rounds
of auctioning (i.e., denial of service attack). This is
a major problem with the schemes of (Harkavy et al.,
1998) and (Sakurai and Miyazaki, 1999). For exam-
ple, if the highest price in the list is k and two bidders
bid at this price, then the auction goes to a second
round of bidding. In this round the maximum value in
the price list increases to k × 2. However, both bid-
ders then bid k × 2. This then forces a third round of
bidding and the maximum value in the price list in-
creases to k × 3, etc. If the bidders continue in this
manner, the auction continues indefinitely.
In addition, many schemes using a price list, also
require bidders to participate in a disavowal protocol
(e.g., (Sakurai and Miyazaki, 1999)). This requires
the bidder to engage in a protocol with the Auctioneer
to show that the bid they submitted is not for that par-
ticular price. Upon completion of disavowal for the
respective price level, the Auctioneer selects the next
price in the list and the process repeats. Unfortunately
disavowal protocols are very expensive as much com-
munication must take place to determine the winner.
ICETE 2005 - SECURITY AND RELIABILITY IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND NETWORKS
344
Furthermore, if some bidders do not participate they
are instantly incriminated, or the auction process is
left in an inconsistent state.
For the reasons stated above, schemes using price
lists tend to be restrictive and are not always practical
for certain types of auctions.
4.5 Payment Issues
A major issue in electronic auction schemes is how to
enforce payment from the winning bidder(s). Previ-
ous schemes have achieved this by using digital cash
schemes. For example, Franklin and Reiter (Franklin
and Reiter, 1996) use a digital coin to represent a bid-
der’s bid. The value of the coin is equivalent to the
amount of the bid. The winner’s coin is deposited into
the seller’s bank account at the end of the protocol. In
this scheme the purpose of the coin is to prevent re-
pudiation of bids. The scheme by (Boyd et al., 2000),
uses a digital cash scheme in a similar manner. When
a bidder repudiates a bid, the identity of the bidder
can be recovered by presenting the bidder’s piece of
digital cash to the bank.
We believe that using digital cash does not sig-
nificantly enhance the security of an electronic auc-
tion scheme. Instead it introduces another party (i.e.,
the bank) to the auction which must be trusted by
the participants. This complicates auction schemes
and makes it increasingly difficult to analyse how se-
cure the scheme is. Franklin and Reiter (Franklin
and Reiter, 1996) claim that their scheme can provide
anonymity through the use of pseudonyms. However
even if this is done, anonymity is still dependent on
the underlying digital cash scheme.
The main goal of digital cash is to allow a spender
to engage in anonymous and untraceable transactions
with a merchant. When the spender breaks the rules
(i.e., repudiates the purchase or double spends the
cash) the only means of recourse is for the bank to re-
veal the spender’s identity. In terms of an anonymous
auction, we are only interested in revealing a bidder’s
identity when there is a dispute (i.e., bid repudiation).
Unless the bank is built into the auctioning model (as
in (Boyd et al., 2000)), other more efficient mecha-
nisms for identity escrow can be used rather than dig-
ital cash schemes.
5 RECOMMENDATIONS
This section provides some suggestions of ways to
fix the problems raised in the previous section and
discusses good design strategies for electronic auc-
tions. Surprisingly there already exists cryptographic
mechanisms to solve many of the problems facing
electronic auctions. However, little if any of the lit-
erature on electronic auctions has embraced this re-
search. The proposed solution comes from group sig-
nature schemes.
A group signature scheme allows members of a
group to sign messages on behalf of the group so that
no one can work out which particular user is the signer
(see (Anteniese et al., 2000)). A signature on a mes-
sage can be verified by anyone using a single public
key. When there is a dispute (i.e., someone repudiates
having signed a message) a trusted group manager can
reveal the identity of the signer of a message. Each
signature is unlinkable and no coalition of users (even
with the help of the group manager) is able to forge a
valid signature of an innocent user.
Group signatures have many desirable properties
with regard to electronic auctions. In an auction, each
bidder belongs to a group of bidders. Every bidder
has a unique signature which enables them to sign
bids anonymously. The bidders submit their bids to
the Auctioneer, who can then verify each signature
using the group’s public key. However, the Auction-
eer cannot solely be the group manager as this would
require all bidders to implicitly trust that the Auction-
eer would not reveal their identities. Instead this task
must be distributed among the Auctioneer and an-
other party (e.g., a registration manager). When there
is a dispute, both the Auctioneer and the other party
must cooperate in order to reveal the identity of whom
signed the bid in question.
In the subsections that follow, we will address each
of the design issues stated in the previous section
and describe how the properties of group signature
schemes can be employed. Throughout this section,
we develop a model for electronic auction design.
This model is not specific to any particular auction
type, but can be used as a general basis for all types
of auctions. Note that mechanisms for sealing bids
will not be discussed. Instead the model addresses
trust, anonymity, bid authentication, price flexibility
and payment enforcement.
5.1 Trust
Using publicly verifiable protocols reduces the trust
required in the Auctioneer. This approach allows all
parties (even outsiders) to view the auction process
and they can verify that the auction outcome is cor-
rect.
Many schemes use public bulletin boards to serve
this purpose (Sakurai and Miyazaki, 1999; Boyd et
al., 2000; Wang and Leung, 2004). An Auctioneer
can post bids and auction results on the board so that
all others can verify the auction proceedings. It is as-
sumed that only the Auctioneer can write to this board
and that it is publicly accessible to all parties.
DESIGN ISSUES FOR ELECTRONIC AUCTIONS
345
Public bulletin boards have implications for sealed
bid auctions as the main requirement is to keep the
losing bids secret. However, in all sealed bid auc-
tion schemes it is inevitable that bidders learn statis-
tics about the bids submitted (i.e., highest price, bid
values, etc). Therefore, using a bulletin board is suf-
ficient for sealed bid auctions, as long as the bidder-
bid relationship remains secret (i.e., bidders cannot be
linked to their bids).
However, even if publicly verifiable protocols are
used there is still some need to trust the Auctioneer.
In this case, the best approach is to use the two-server
trust model (see Section 4.1). This needs to be mod-
ified slightly in that the second party is only required
in the case of a dispute but cannot act on his/her own
(as in the case of the TTP approach). This will be
clarified in the next section.
5.2 Anonymity
To protect against the procrastinating attack described
in section 4.2, there must be complete separation be-
tween the registration and bidding stages of an auc-
tion. This means that all bidders must register prior to
the Auctioneer accepting any bids. This is a straight-
forward matter for English, Vickrey and Dutch auc-
tions as the Auctioneer can prevent the auction from
starting until all bidders have registered.
However, in CDAs it is impossible to separate the
registration and bidding stages. In this situation a
group signature scheme can be used. Group signa-
tures are unlinkable, which means that given two sig-
natures, it is impossible to tell if the same user signed
both messages. This thwarts the procrastinating at-
tack as S
1
can no longer determine if the signature
that they are observing belongs to the newly regis-
tered bidder or someone else. Even if S
1
does learn
the mapping between the newly registered bidder and
the signature on a bid, the registration manager will
not be able to link future bids to the bidder due to the
unlinkability property of the group signature.
5.3 Bid Authentication
In general, authentication protocols require consider-
able time consuming operations such as exponentia-
tion. However, there are algorithms that can be em-
ployed for performing multiple verifications in one
stage/operation (e.g., (Bellare et al., 1998)). Group
signatures are also an effective method of performing
bid authentication.
5.4 Price Determination
Bidders must be allowed flexibility when choosing
their bid values. Using a group signature approach fa-
cilitates price flexibility as bidders are free to choose
whatever bid values they desire. Furthermore, a group
signature scheme does not require the use of a dis-
avowal protocol. In general, designers of electronic
auctions should avoid disavowal protocols.
5.5 Payment Enforcement
As stated in Section 4.5, digital cash schemes only
serve as a non-repudiation mechanism in auctions
and makes the scheme conceptually harder to under-
stand. There are more efficient identity escrow mech-
anisms other then digital cash. Again group signature
schemes are an ideal choice. When there is a dispute,
(i.e., someone repudiates a bid, or refuses to pay), the
group manager can reveal the identity of the person
that signed the bid in question. This is more efficient
then a digital cash scheme and serves the same pur-
pose.
5.6 Group Signature Auction Model
This section proposes a generic auction model using a
group signature scheme. The model incorporates the
recommendations from the previous subsections. Fur-
thermore, it gives the designer flexibility to use any
group signature scheme.
There are three parties in the auction:
1. A Bidder, who is interested in submitting bids for
an item offered by a seller.
2. An Auctioneer, who organises the auction, accepts
the bids and determines the winner according to the
auction rules. The Auctioneer also holds the corre-
sponding relation of the identity and a token asso-
ciated with each bidder. The Auctioneer has access
to a publicly verifiable bulletin board.
3. A Registrar, who takes part in a protocol in order to
complete the registration of a bidder who has ob-
tained a token from the Auctioneer. At the end of
the protocol, the bidder obtains a secret key that
enables him/her to generate signed bids in a proper
format.
Setup - The Auctioneer organises the auction (i.e., ad-
vertising and calls for auction). The Registrar sets up
the group public key and his secret key.
Registration - A user submits a request to the Auc-
tioneer to participate in the auction. The Auctioneer
verifies the identity of the requestor, and issues a to-
ken that is verifiable by the Registrar. The user then
takes part in a protocol with the Registrar, in order
to obtain his secret key and a certificate of member-
ship in the auction. Note that the token does not carry
the real identity of the bidder, but all communication
between the Registrar and the owner of a token is au-
thenticated, and will be kept for tracing, or revealing
the identity of users associated with tokens.
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Bidding - Using a membership certificate, a bidder
can generate anonymous and unlinkable group signa-
tures on a bid. A bidder submits a bid to the Auc-
tioneer signed using the secret key. The Auctioneer
verifies the signature on the bid using the public key.
If the bid is valid, the Auctioneer posts it on the bul-
letin board.
Winner Determination - The Auctioneer determines
the auction outcome according to auction rules (i.e.,
English, Vickrey, etc.). The auction result is posted on
the bulletin and the winner can produce his/her signed
bid as evidence that they won.
Traceability - In the event of a dispute (i.e., bid
repudiation), the Auctioneer and the Registrar can
combine their information to reveal the identity of a
signer.
6 CONCLUSION
Limited attention has been paid to the design issues
of electronic auctioning schemes. This paper demon-
strated that poor auction designs breach the security
of any auction scheme irrespective of how secure the
underlying cryptographic building blocks are. Auc-
tions were examined in terms of trust, anonymity, bid
authentication, price determination and payment en-
forcement.
We have shown that many schemes proposed in lit-
erature are not practical and can be broken by exploit-
ing weakness in the fundamental design employed. A
group signature scheme can solve many of the prob-
lems in electronic auction design. However, this is not
an all-encompassing solution to all of the design is-
sues. It is insufficient to rely on cryptographic mech-
anisms alone. An auction system is only secure as its
weakest component.
There still remain many pressing issues in design-
ing electronic auctions. Now the time has come for
the designers of auction schemes to step away from
the small-view approach and observe the auction sys-
tem as a whole. Designers need to analyse how each
component interacts and scrutinise whether the cryp-
tographic methods employed are really sufficient for
use in electronic auction schemes.
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