Securing Mobile Auctions in the Presence of Malicious Adversaries

This paper studies practical auction systems for allocating resources in the wireless environments. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. In the first fold, a novel solution to mobile auction (m-auction) systems is presented based on the notion of convertibly undeniable signatures which in turn, can be viewed as a light-weight version of verifiably encrypted signatures in the bulletin board model. The idea behind of our construction is simple yet useful - we view salts that are used to mask convertibly undeniable signatures as public keys for authenticating bidding flows in m-auction systems. As a result, the cost of communication and computation for refreshing auxiliary information is zero and thus our systems are suitable for mobile devices whose computation resources are limited. In the second fold, we show that our implementation enjoys the following nice features: (i) it is provably secure in the standard intractability paradigm;(ii) it is provably secure against signature forgery attack; (iii) it is indistinguishable (addressing the stand-alone property of convertible signatures).