This paper proposes a semi-quantum protocol for multi-item simultaneous ascending auctions, addressing limitations of existing quantum auctions that require complex resources and full quantum capabilities from bidders. Utilizing single-particle states and a trusted third party (HTP) for state management, our protocol allows resource-constrained bidders to participate using only simple operations. The HTP dynamically updates quantum sequences and announces leading bids iteratively until convergence. Simulations confirm practical feasibility with current technology and demonstrate security guarantees including anonymity, verifiability, and non-repudiation, providing a scalable solution for real-world auction environments.
This paper proposes a semi-quantum protocol for multi-item simultaneous ascending auctions, addressing limitations of existing quantum auctions that require complex resources and full quantum capabilities from bidders. Utilizing single-particle states and a trusted third party (HTP) for state management, our protocol allows resource-constrained bidders to participate using only simple operations. The HTP dynamically updates quantum sequences and announces leading bids iteratively until convergence. Simulations confirm practical feasibility with current technology and demonstrate security guarantees including anonymity, verifiability, and non-repudiation, providing a scalable solution for real-world auction environments.
Simultaneous ascending auctions find extensive applications in spectrum licensing and advertising space allocation. However, existing quantum sealed-bid auction protocols suffer from dual limitations: they cannot support multi-item simultaneous bidding scenarios, and their reliance on complex quantum resources along with requiring full quantum operational capabilities from bidders fails to accommodate practical constraints of quantum resource-limited users. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a multi-party semi-quantum simultaneous ascending auction protocol based on single-particle states. The protocol employs a trusted honest third party (HTP) responsible for quantum state generation, distribution, and security verification. Bidders determine their groups through quantum measurements and privately encode their bid vectors. Upon successful HTP authentication, each bidder obtains a unique identity code. During the bidding phase, HTP dynamically updates quantum sequences, allowing bidders to submit bids for multiple items by performing only simple unitary operations. HTP announces the highest bid for each item in real time and iteratively generates auction sequences until no new highest bid emerges, thereby achieving simultaneous ascending auctions for multiple items. It acts as a quantum-secured signaling layer, ensuring unconditional security for bid transmission and identity verification while maintaining classical auction logic. Quantum circuit simulations validate the protocol's feasibility with current technology while satisfying critical security requirements, including anonymity, verifiability, non-repudiation, and privacy preservation. It provides a scalable semi-quantum auction solution for resource-constrained scenarios.
Quantum sealed-bid auction (QSA) is a special form of transaction with significant applications in the economic and financial fields. Using a unique set of locally indistinguishable orthogonal product (LIOP) states, we propose a new QSA protocol in this paper. In the protocol, the bid message is encoded as a quantum sequence of LIOP states, and the different particles of LIOP states are transmitted separately. Even though an attacker obtains a portion of the particles, they cannot recover the entire bid message because of the local indistinguishability of LIOP states. Once the auctioneer announces the winner’s bid, all bidders are able to confirm the authenticity of their bid. With the help of a semi-honest third party, collusion between the auctioneer and a malicious bidder can be discovered. Finally, our protocol is capable of meeting all requirements for secure sealed-bid auctions through security and completeness analysis. Additionally, the proposed protocol does not require any entangled resources and complicated operations, so it can be easily implemented in practice.
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.
In this brief, we present a novel quantum protocol for sealed-bid auction and design the corresponding quantum circuits. In the proposed protocol, we introduce two auctioneers to ensure that they can supervise each other, where one is a classical auctioneer, and the other is a quantum auctioneer. Furthermore, we turn sealed-bid auction into secure multiparty summation by employing the Chinese Remainder Theorem to achieve the anonymity. Compared with the related protocols, the proposed protocol can meet more security properties, e.g., anonymity, fairness, verifiability, secrecy and non-repudiation.
Secure multi-party computation (SMC) addresses the problem of jointly computing global functions of private inputs while revealing minimal information about individual data. Two prominent examples of SMC tasks are sealed-bid auction and secure multi-party summation. Existing schemes for quantum auction and quantum summation have largely been developed independently, motivated by distinct applications and employing different computational primitives. In this work, mutual reductions between the two tasks are established for single-item sealed-bid auctions with first-price payment. In one direction, an auction used as a black box computes a secure sum: each party bids a private random key drawn from its input, so the clearing price depends on the inputs only through their sum S. The reduction is perfectly private against colluding semi-honest parties and uses O(S2log(1/δ)) auction rounds, which is optimal, or O(Slog(1/δ)) under coherent access. It can be instantiated with an existing auctioneer-free quantum auction after a one-line change to its disjunction subroutine, which as published leaks occupancy counts. In the other direction, summation with randomized inputs yields threshold disjunctions, and a single search over composite keys locates the highest bid and a winner, revealing nothing else. Because each query consumes the bidders' encodings, a bidder can adapt its effective bid undetected, while a fixed query set restores sealed bidding. Combinatorial auctions and general payment rules lie outside this framework. On a superconducting processor, one instance of each direction is executed, recovering the winner for four-bidder instances with ties and the sum of private inputs from repeated auctions.
We present a quantum auction protocol using superpositions to represent bids and distributed search to identify the winner(s). Measuring the final quantum state gives the auction outcome while simultaneously destroying the superposition. Thus, non-winning bids are never revealed. Participants can use entanglement to arrange for correlations among their bids, with the assurance that this entanglement is not observable by others. This protocol is useful for information hiding applications, such as partnership bidding with allocative externality or concerns about revealing bidding preferences. The protocol applies to a variety of auction types, e.g. first or second price, and to auctions involving either a single item or arbitrary bundles of items (i.e. combinatorial auctions). We analyze the game-theoretical behavior of the quantum protocol for the simple case of a sealed-bid quantum, and show how a suitably designed adiabatic search reduces the possibilities for bidders to game the auction. This design illustrates how incentive rather that computational constraints affect quantum algorithm choices.