Seminars

View all Seminars  |  Download ICal for this event

Secure Vickrey Auctions with Rational Parties

Series: Ph.D. Thesis Defense

Speaker: Shreyas Gupta, Ph.D (Engg.) student, Dept. of CSA, IISc

Date/Time: Oct 07 14:30:00

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

Faculty Advisor: Prof.Bhavana Kanukurthi

Abstract:
This work deals with construction of a second price (Vickrey) auction protocol (SPA), which does not require any auctioneers and ensures total privacy in the presence of rational parties participating in auction. In particular, the confidentiality of the highest bid and the identity of the second highest bidder are protected. We model the bidders participating in the second price auction as rational, computationally bounded and privacy-sensitive parties. These are self-interested agents who care about winning the auction more than learning about the private bids of other parties. A rational party does not deviate from the protocol arbitrarily but does so only for its own individual advantage -- without any consideration for others. Such an advantage is modeled using suitable utility functions.

We show that for rational and computationally bounded parties participating in our second-price auctions protocol, there exists a privacy-preserving dominant strategy equilibrium in which every party prefers to follow the protocol rather than to deviate.

Our protocol is implemented using open-source cryptographic constructs. Running our SPA protocol on commodity hardware with 15 bidders, with 10 bids of length bits, completes in 1.26 sec and has total communication of 0.77 MB whereas, under similar conditions, Atlas (semi-honest) protocol takes 40% more time (2.11 sec) and more communication (6.09MB).

Speaker Bio:
Shreyas Gupta is a PhD student working in cryptography at IISc. Prior to this, he received his masters in computer science from Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. His research interests lie in theoretical cryptography and rational adversarial model for secure computation. He is also interested in intersection of quantum computation, cryptography and formal logic. Microsoft teams link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_YjIzNTM5NjUtN2U5Yi00OTMyLWJiYzYtMGI1ZDk0ZjlmYjUw%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%226f15cd97-f6a7-41e3-b2c5-ad4193976476%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22c747ccaa-ceaa-4197-b4cb-ce2f1d4694da%22%7d