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Security analysis with improved design of post-confirmation mechanism for quantum sealed-bid auction with single photons

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Abstract

Quantum sealed-bid auction (QSA) has been widely studied in quantum cryptography. For a successful auction, post-confirmation is regarded as an important mechanism to make every bidder verify the identity of the winner after the auctioneer has announced the result. However, since the auctioneer may be dishonest and collude with malicious bidders in practice, some potential loopholes could exist. In this paper, we point out two types of collusion attacks for a particular post-confirmation technique with EPR pairs. And it is not difficult to see that there exists no unconditionally secure post-confirmation mechanism in the existing QSA model, if the dishonest participants have the ability to control multiparticle entanglement. In the view of this, we note that some secure implementation could exist if the participants are supposed to be semi-quantum, i.e., they can only control single photons. Finally, two potential methods to design post-confirmation mechanism are presented in this restricted scenario.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 11647128, 61472097; the Natural Science Foundation of Heilongjiang Province under Grant Nos. A2016007; the China Scholarship Council (Grant No. 201607320084); Youth Foundation of Heilongjiang University under Grant No. QL201501 and Hei Long Jiang Postdoctoral Foundation from December, 2017.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, 150001, China

    Ke-Jia Zhang & Chun-Guang Ma

  2. School of Mathematical Science, Heilongjiang University, Harbin, 150080, China

    Ke-Jia Zhang, Long Zhang & Hong-Wei Sun

  3. Centre for Quantum Technologies, National University of Singapore, 3 Science Drive 2, Singapore, 117543, Singapore

    Ke-Jia Zhang & Leong-Chuan Kwek

  4. MajuLab, CNRS-UNS-NUS-NTU International Joint Research Unit, UMI 3654, Singapore, Singapore

    Leong-Chuan Kwek

  5. National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, 1 Nanyang Walk, Singapore, 637616, Singapore

    Leong-Chuan Kwek

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  1. Ke-Jia Zhang
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Correspondence to Ke-Jia Zhang.

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Zhang, KJ., Kwek, LC., Ma, CG. et al. Security analysis with improved design of post-confirmation mechanism for quantum sealed-bid auction with single photons. Quantum Inf Process 17, 38 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-017-1808-3

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