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Abstract

A method for secure multi-party function evaluation with a non-limiting application to the holding of auctions. The outcome of an auction can be determined by an auctioneer without learning any information about the bids, except for the bid which determines the clearing price, and without learning any information about the bidders, except for the winning bidder. The security of this information is maintained even after the conclusion of the auction. Moreover, the bidders can individually and privately verify that the auction was conducted correctly, thereby establishing a mechanism for trust. The method is well-suited to the holding of privacy-protected auctions over computer networks because of its high efficiency, requiring only a single round of interactive communication without any communication among the bidders. Furthermore, the bulk of the computation and data communication or the protocol can be done in advance of the auction itself, and is adaptable to distribution via stored media. The function evaluated by the method can be generalized to any function which can be evaluated by a circuit of gates. The method can be applied in general as a secure multi-party function evaluation protocol, which, in addition to auctions, can also be applied to a number of other special cases, such as Generalized Vickrey Auctions, Groves-Clarke mechanisms, opinion polling, and stable matching.

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