Our Secure Auction Marketplace allows an untrustworthy auctioneer to conduct a wide variety of auctions efficiently.
The main problem we address is that the bidders do not need to trust the auctioneer and nevertheless, they can get very strong security guarantees, such as correct bidding result, abuse-freeness, confidentiality of bids, and anonymity. These requirements are difficult to achieve, even if the auctioneer uses a secure coprocessor to direct the auction, because in the general case, the auctioneer writes the software which runs on the secure coprocessor. A malicious auctioneer could simply write auction software which decodes the secret bids inside the secure coprocessor and sends it to the auctioneer in clear text. How can the bidders be guaranteed which software will conduct the auction?