Previous approaches have to use complex cryptographic algorithms and complicated system setups to achieve varying security properties. Our approach is more general and flexible to adapt to new auction schemes, and to provide different security properties. (We would like to emphasize that the cryptographic solutions currently fail to solve some basic auction problems with sufficient security.)
In SAM, the auction specification precisely states which information is private, public, or should be disclosed only to a subset of the participants. The auction result is disclosed in conformance with the result disclosure rules. This flexibility and ability of controllable information distribution is unachieved by the current cryptographic solutions for secure auctions.