Using homomorphic encryption to secure the combinatorial spectrum auction without the trustworthy auctioneer

Abstract

Spectrum auction is an enabling technology for improving the spectrum efficiency of unused licensed bands (white spaces) in wireless networks. However, the back-room dealing (i.e., the frauds of the untrustworthy auctioneer and the bid-rigging between the greedy bidders and the insincere auctioneer) poses serious security challenges, leading to failures of all existing secure auction designs in allocating spectrum bands. In this paper, we propose a secure combinatorial spectrum auction (SCSA) by utilizing homomorphic encryption to prevent the backroom dealing. The idea in SCSA is to incorporate cryptographic techniques into the spectrum auction to address the frauds and bid-rigging. It computes and reveals the results of spectrum auction while the actual bidding values of bidders are kept confidential. SCSA also provides a corresponding procedure in implementing the combinatorial spectrum auction under the interference constraints. We show that compared with existing secure spectrum auction designs against the untrustworthy auctioneer, SCSA is much more efficient in both communication and computational complexity; and compared with other spectrum auction designs with security consideration, SCSA can effectively thwart the back-room dealings due to the untrustworthy auctioneer without too much performance degradation.

Privacy-preserving combinatorial auction without an auctioneer

“…However, SPRING depends on a trusted third party (the agent). In [6,7], the authors utilize a vector of cipher text to mask the bidding prices, and guarantee that the maximum value, randomizing the bids, and charging the bidders can be figured out. However, the schemes [6,7] are not practical as homomorphic encryption has a very high computational overhead, which is not applicable to the applications now.…”

“…In [6,7], the authors utilize a vector of cipher text to mask the bidding prices, and guarantee that the maximum value, randomizing the bids, and charging the bidders can be figured out. However, the schemes [6,7] are not practical as homomorphic encryption has a very high computational overhead, which is not applicable to the applications now. In [8], a secure auction without auctioneer scheme for VCG auction is designed based on homomorphic, in which the bidders work together to decide who the winner is without auctioneer; however, the computational overhead is high for each bidder, which has low efficiency.…”

“…However, SPRING depends on a trusted third party (the agent). In [6][7][8][9][10], homomorphic encryption [11][12][13] is employed to hid each bidder's bidding values with a vector of cipher texts, and ensures the auctioneer to figure out the maximum value, and charge the bidders securely. However, the homomorphic encryption has a higher computational cost, which is not practical now.…”

Secure multi-unit sealed first-price auction mechanisms

“…Therefore, to be secured, it is critical to design auction mechanisms to preserve bid privacy. For this purpose, a number of secure auctions have been proposed . However, there are still some weaknesses in these approaches.…”

Truthful multi-attribute auction with discriminatory pricing in cognitive radio networks

“…To achieve this objective, auctions have been applied to construct market-based mechanisms for spectrum allocation [1,6,7,9,10,12,15,16,21,22,24,[27][28][29]. But most existing research overlooks the following important issues in a spectrum trading market.…”