This paper proposes the Secure Auction Marketplace (SAM), an architecture for electronic auctions using trusted hardware. This architecture provides a way to flexibly and systematically address security, privacy, trust, and fraud problems -- and is implementable with current off-the-shelf technology.
An auction is a general mechanism for commercial interaction. However, implementing auctions in the setting of distributed computing is complicated by several fundamental properties:
In a distributed setting, these properties create a fundamental trust challenge: we need to distribute this information and computation among the parties themselves, in way such that the computation is still correct, and all involved parties can still trust that their respective interests are preserved.
Recent advances in secure co-processing provide a foundation to address these problems. COTS secure coprocessor platforms now provide:
In this paper, we use this foundation to build our Secure Auction Marketplaces: havens that individual auctioneers can configure to carry out this auction computation, that resolve these trust issues in a much more general and flexible way than was possible with previous cryptographic approaches.
Section 2 provides more discussions of our auction model. Section 3 reviews previous approaches to this problem, and presents the secure co-processing technology that enables our approach. Section 4 presents our marketplace architecture. Section 5 demonstrates its value by discussing some of the security and privacy properties it achieves. Section 6 demonstrates its flexibility by presenting some avenues to extend this basic architecture. Section 7 concludes with some avenues for future work.