A secure double auction protocol against false bids

M. Yokoo et al. analyzed some weaknesses in McAfee's double auction (MCD) protocol and proposed a robust threshold price double auction (TPD) protocol against false-name bids. Unfortunately, as their protocol strongly depends on the trust of auctioneer, the auctioneer's misbehavior may fail an auction process. In addition, their scheme is in fact not robust in terms of comprehensive false bids. In this paper, we further investigate weaknesses in both MCD and TPD protocols, and then propose an improved double auction protocol against false bids. We also extend it for a practical and secure double auction implementation. This is based on a hybrid trust model, where computation load is distributed to buyers and sellers while a semi-trusted manager handles the registration phase. A prominent feature of the extended protocol is its high robustness, achieved by using a publicly verifiable secret sharing scheme with threshold access structure.