Seminars

View all Seminars  |  Download ICal for this event

Secure Auctions with Rational Parties

Series: Ph.D. Colloquium

Speaker: Girisha B S Ph.D (Engg.) student, Dept. of CSA

Date/Time: Apr 17 13:30:00

Location: CSA Auditorium, (Room No. 104, Ground Floor)

Faculty Advisor: Prof. Chaya Ganesh & Prof. Bhavana Kanukurthi

Abstract:
Sealed bid auctions are used to allocate a resource among a set of interested parties. Traditionally, auctions need the presence of a trusted auctioneer to whom the bidders provide their private bid values. Existence of such a trusted party is not an assumption easily realized in practice. Generic secure computation protocols can be used to remove a trusted party. However, generic techniques often result in inefficient protocols, and typically do not provide fairness. Instead, we consider parties that are rational bidders. Such parties are modelled as self-interested agents who care more about maximizing their utility than about learning information about bids of other agents. To realize this, we use the notion of information utility and introduce a game-theoretic framework that helps analyse protocols while taking into account both information utility as well as monetary utility. In this work, we construct the first concretely efficient and provably secure protocol for First Price Auctions in the rational setting. Our protocol guarantees privacy, public verifiability and fairness. We put forth a solution concept that we call Privacy Enhanced Computational Weakly Dominant Strategy Equilibrium that captures parties privacy and monetary concerns in the game theoretic context, and show that our protocol realizes this.. We believe that this notion can be of independent interest.