In most of the auction systems the values of bids are known to the auctioneer. This allows him to manipulate the outcome of
the auction. Hence, one might be interested in hiding these values. Some cryptographically secure protocols for electronic
auctions have been presented in the last decade. Our work extends these protocols in several ways. On the basis of garbled
circuits, i.e., encrypted circuits, we present protocols for sealed-bid auctions that fulfill the following requirements:
1) protocols are information-theoretically
t-private for
honest but curious parties; 2) the number of bits that can be learned by
malicious adversaries is bounded by the output length of the auction; 3) the computational requirements for participating parties are very low:
only random bit choices and bitwise computation of the XOR-function are necessary. Note that one can distinguish between the
protocol that generates a garbled circuit for an auction and the protocol to evaluate the auction. In this paper we address
both problems. We will present a
t-private protocol for the construction of a garbled circuit that reaches the lower bound of 2
t + 1 parties, and a more randomness efficient protocol for (
t + 1)
2 parties. Finally, we address the problem of bid changes in an auction.
Keywords multi-party private and secure computation - garbled circuits - private auctions