[Resource Topic] 2017/1044: Strain: A Secure Auction for Blockchains

Welcome to the resource topic for 2017/1044

Title:
Strain: A Secure Auction for Blockchains

Authors: Erik-Oliver Blass, 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.

ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1044

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