A secure multi-item e-auction mechanism with bid privacy

The recent focus within the auction field has been multi-item auctions where bidders are not restricted to buying only one item of the merchandise. It has been of practical importance in Internet auction sites and has been widely executed by them. In this paper, we concentrate on the use of the multi-item auction for task assignment scenarios and propose a novel PUPA auction protocol to solve the problem of bid privacy in multi-item auctions. A verifiable technique of shared key chain is proposed to find the winners without revealing the losing bid and bidder’s privacy. It can be shown that our new scheme is robust against cheating bidders.