A secure reverse Vickrey auction scheme with bid privacy

In recent years auctions have become more and more important in the field of multi-agent systems as useful mechanisms for resource allocations, task assignments and electronic commerce. In this paper, we concentrate on the use of the reverse Vickrey auction for task assignment scenarios and propose a novel RVP auction protocol as a method to solve problems to bid privacy in reverse Vickrey auctions. A verifiable technique of encryption key chain is used to find the second lowest bid without revealing the losing bid and unnecessary information. Through analysis, it is verified that our new scheme is robust against cheating bidders.