The secure quantum sealed-bid auction protocol [Mosayeb Naseri, Opt. Commun.282 (2009) 1939] is revisited. It is found that, utilizing intercept-measure-resend attacks, any evil bidder can make the auction aborted without being detected by the auctioneer. Further, if the evil bidder succeeds to be the first bidder, then he/she can win conclusively in the auction. To prevent such attacks, some defence strategies are adopted in the qubit distribution stage and the channel security check stage respectively and the original protocol is therefore modified somewhat.
The secure quantum sealed-bid auction protocol [Mosayeb Naseri, Opt. Commun.282 (2009) 1939] is revisited. It is found that, utilizing intercept-measure-resend attacks, any evil bidder can make the auction aborted without being detected by the auctioneer. Further, if the evil bidder succeeds to be the first bidder, then he/she can win conclusively in the auction. To prevent such attacks, some defence strategies are adopted in the qubit distribution stage and the channel security check stage respectively and the original protocol is therefore modified somewhat.
Quantum sealed-bid auction (QSA) is expected to provide an alternative to classical sealed-bid auction to defend against attacks from quantum adversaries. However, most previous QSA protocols required bidders to have quantum operation capabilities, resulting in excessive quantum resource requirements. To relieve the burden of protocol quantum resources, a measurement-based quantum sealed-bid auction protocol with the one-way transmission is proposed. Compared to previous protocols, our protocol only requires bidders to perform measurements, and no other operations, such as Pauli or Phase operations, are required. In order to verify the correctness and feasibility of the proposed QSA protocol, the corresponding quantum circuits are designed and simulated by IBM Qiskit. The proposed protocol satisfies security properties, including anonymity, fairness, verifiability, privacy, and non-repudiation. In addition, we further extend the protocol to scenarios that do not require an auctioneer and achieve bid privacy protection for unsuccessful bidders. Therefore, our protocol may have broad applications in auction scenarios.
Recently, an experimentally feasible three-party quantum sealed-bid auction protocol based on EPR pairs [Z.Y. Wang, Commun. Theor. Phys. 54 (2010) 997 ] was proposed. However, this study points out Wang's protocol cannot resist some internal bidders' attacks, such as the Twice-CNOT attack, the collusion attack. A malicious bidder can launch the Twice-CNOT attack to obtain the other's bid, or the dishonest auctioneer may collude with one bidder and help him/her win the action by changing his/her bid. For preventing against these attacks, a simple solution by using the QKD-based message encryption and a post-confirmation mechanism by adopting the hash function are proposed.
In this article, we first define a primitive problem of secure multiparty computations, i.e., secure multiparty disjunction (SMD), and present a novel quantum protocol for SMD that can ensure information-theoretical security, i.e., unconditional security. Furthermore, based on the quantum SMD protocol, we design a quantum sealed-bid auction (QSA) scheme without an auctioneer. In the proposed QSA scheme, all bidders can jointly find the winning bidder without the help of an auctioneer while it can perfectly protect the privacy of nonwinning bidders. The proposed quantum SMD protocol and quantum QSA scheme take Bell states as quantum resources and only perform single-particle Pauli operators and two-particle Bell measurements. Finally, we simulate the related quantum protocols in Qiskit and verify the correctness and the feasibility of the proposed protocols.
A sealed-bid auction is an essential tool for trading commodities in modern society. However, the non-winning bidders in previously proposed sealed-bid auction schemes lack privacy protection. In this paper, we define a sealed-bid auction with strong privacy protection, which can protect the privacy of all non-winning bidders. In order to fulfil the task, we first present a quantum secret sharing protocol and a secure quantum summation protocol and then design their corresponding quantum circuits, where the security of the latter is guaranteed by the former, while the former is information-theoretically secure. We further present a quantum seal-bid auction (QSA) scheme with strong privacy protection based on the designed quantum protocols. In our QSA scheme, each bidder first encodes a private vector by his private bid and public agreement information, and then all bidders jointly compute the summations of their respective private vectors without a trusted third party. Finally, we verify the correctness and the feasibility of the proposed QSA scheme by circuit simulations in IBM Qiskit.
In this paper, the cryptanalysis about the quantum sealed-bid auction, whose feature is that by introducing a postconfirmation mechanism the malicious bidders cannot collude with auctioneers, is given. We found that a malicious bidder can obtain the other bidders' bids with a probability of 0.854. Moreover, there will be a higher probability if some bidders collude to attack the other bidders' bids. To prevent such attacks, we propose an effective improvement by means of the hash function.
Sealed-bid auction is an important tool in modern economic especially concerned with networks. However, the bidders still lack the privacy protection in previously proposed sealed-bid auction schemes. In this paper, we focus on how to further protect the privacy of the bidders, especially the non-winning bidders. We first give a new privacy-preserving model of sealed-bid auction and then present a quantum sealed-bid auction scheme with stronger privacy protection. Our proposed scheme takes a general state in N-dimensional Hilbert space as the message carrier, in which each bidder privately marks his bid in an anonymous way, and further utilizes Grover's search algorithm to find the current highest bid. By O(lnn) iterations, it can get the highest bid finally. Compared with any classical scheme in theory, our proposed quantum scheme gets the lower communication complexity.