Publication

Blockchain-based Practical Multi-agent Secure Comparison and its Application in Auctions

Abstract

AI applications find widespread use in a variety of domains. For further acceptance, mostly when multiple agents interact with the system, we must aim to preserve the privacy of participants information in such applications. Towards this, the Yao’s Millionaires’ problem (YMP), i.e., to determine the richer among two millionaires’ privately, finds relevance. This work presents a novel, practical, and verifiable solution to YMP, namely, Secure Comparison Protocol (SCP). We show that SCP achieves this comparison in a constant number of rounds, without using encryption and not requiring the participants’ continuous involvement. SCP uses semi-trusted third parties - which we refer to as privacy accountants - for the comparison, who do not learn any information about the values. That is, the probability of information leak is negligible in the problem size. In SCP, we also leverage the Ethereum network for pseudo-anonymous communication, unlike computationally expensive secure channels such as Tor. We present a Secure Truthful cOmbinatorial aUction Protocol (STOUP) for single-minded bidders to demonstrate SCP’s significance. We show that STOUP, unlike previous works, preserves the privacies relevant to an auction even from the auctioneer. We demonstrate the practicality of STOUP through simulations.

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Related concepts (22)
Cryptographic protocol
A cryptographic protocol is an abstract or concrete protocol that performs a security-related function and applies cryptographic methods, often as sequences of cryptographic primitives. A protocol describes how the algorithms should be used and includes details about data structures and representations, at which point it can be used to implement multiple, interoperable versions of a program. Cryptographic protocols are widely used for secure application-level data transport.
Secure Shell
The Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. Its most notable applications are remote login and command-line execution. SSH applications are based on a client–server architecture, connecting an SSH client instance with an SSH server. SSH operates as a layered protocol suite comprising three principal hierarchical components: the transport layer provides server authentication, confidentiality, and integrity; the user authentication protocol validates the user to the server; and the connection protocol multiplexes the encrypted tunnel into multiple logical communication channels.
Secure multi-party computation
Secure multi-party computation (also known as secure computation, multi-party computation (MPC) or privacy-preserving computation) is a subfield of cryptography with the goal of creating methods for parties to jointly compute a function over their inputs while keeping those inputs private. Unlike traditional cryptographic tasks, where cryptography assures security and integrity of communication or storage and the adversary is outside the system of participants (an eavesdropper on the sender and receiver), the cryptography in this model protects participants' privacy from each other.
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