Verifiable e-auction over a Block-Chain

Abstract

Auction has been an integral part of trading throughout ages. Sealed-bid e-auction (both first-price and second-price) is considered to be a classic example of Secure Multi-Party Computation problem. In this project, without assuming any role of auctioneer, we try to formulate a protocol in which the bidders jointly compute the highest bid, keeping all the losing bids secret to the bidders. The focus of the work is to study and implement a verifiable sealed-bid e-auction scheme in decentralized settings. We have studies some possible choices of schemes and decides to further work on the SEAL protocol, which eventually is the first decentralized sealed-bid auction protocol to achieve linear computation and communication complexity. The project aims to build a platform which shall take bit-strings as bid inputs from the bidders and output the final result which is maximum among the bids. We have implemented the segments of the protocol using Solidity Language over a Test Ethereum Network and the front end is to be done using HTML Languages. This implementation targets to achieve publicly verifiability without leaking information about the bids form the bidders.