Formal Verification of e-Auction Protocols

Auctions have a long history, having been recorded as early as 500 B.C.. With the rise of Internet, electronic auctions have been a great success and are increasingly used. Many cryptographic protocols have been proposed to address the various security requirements of these electronic transactions. We propose a formal framework to analyze and verify security properties of e-Auction protocols. We model protocols in the Applied p-Calculus and define privacy notions, which include secrecy of bids, anonymity of the participants, receipt-freeness and coercion-resistance. We also discuss fairness, non-repudiation and non-cancellation. Additionally we show on two case studies how these properties can be verified automatically using ProVerif, and discover several attacks.