BSEA: A Blind Sealed-Bid E-Auction Scheme for E-Commerce Applications

Due to an increase in the number of internet users, electronic commerce has grown significantly during the last decade. Electronic auction (e-auction) is one of the famous e-commerce applications. Even so, security and robustness of e-auction schemes still remain a challenge. Requirements like anonymity and privacy of the bid value are under threat from the attackers. Any auction protocol must not leak the anonymity and the privacy of the bid value of an honest Bidder. Keeping these requirements in mind, we have firstly proposed a controlled traceable blind signature scheme (CTBSS) because e-auction schemes should be able to trace the Bidders. Using CTBSS, a blind sealed-bid electronic auction scheme is proposed (BSEA). We have incorporated the notion of blind signature to e-auction schemes. Moreover, both the schemes are based upon elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), which provides a similar level of security with a comparatively smaller key size than the discrete logarithm problem (DLP) based e-auction protocols. The analysis shows that BSEA fulfills all the requirements of e-auction protocol, and the total computation overhead is lower than the existing schemes.