Franklin and Reiter [5], and Harkavy, Tygar and
Kikuchi [6], address auction security issues and they propose to
use multiple auctioneers and variations of secret sharing schemes to reduce the
trust on a single auctioneer
. But the approaches using multiple auctioneers are
in general expensive, and difficult to adapt to other auction types and privacy
requirements.
Stubblebine and Syverson [18] propose to use certified mail and online notary services to reduce the trust on a single auctioneer in English auctions. This approach has the drawback that it requires to trust the additional services.
Naor, Pinkas, and Reingold present a scheme which is based on garbled circuits and oblivious transfer [10]. Their system can achieve similar security properties as SAM at the cost of a substantial communication and computation overhead. Although their approach is theoretically interesting, the large overhead prohibits a practical implementation.