Paper 2024/1410

Cryptobazaar: Private Sealed-bid Auctions at Scale

Abstract

This work introduces Cryptobazaar, a novel scalable, private, and decentralized sealed-bid auction protocol. In particular, our protocol protects the privacy of losing bidders by preserving the confidentiality of their bids while ensuring public verifiability of the outcome and relying only on a single untrusted auctioneer for coordination. At its core, Cryptobazaar combines an efficient distributed protocol to compute the logical-OR for a list of unary-encoded bids with various novel zero-knowledge succinct arguments of knowledge that may be of independent interest. We further present variants of our protocol that can be used for efficient first-, second-, and more generally $(p+1)$st-price as well as sequential first-price auctions. Finally, the performance evaluation of our Cryptobazaar implementation shows that it is highly practical. For example, a single run of an auction with $128$ bidders and a price range of $1024$ values terminates in less than $0.5$ sec and requires each bidder to send and receive only about $32$ KB of data.