A Novel Electronic English Auction System With a Secure On-Shelf Mechanism

With the advances of network technology, electronic auctions have become increasingly popular in recent years. In 2012, Xiong et al. proposed a bidder-anonymous auction scheme based on revocable ring signature to enhance the computation efficiency and provide a dispute protocol. Nevertheless, we find that it has design weaknesses and is vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. Furthermore, in an actual electronic auction system such as Yahoo! and eBay, a user can play the role of not only a bidder, but also an auctioneer. Considering the essentiality of the discussion of the secure products on-shelf process for auctioneers, we design a new electronic auction system with a secure on-shelf mechanism in this paper. In our system, users can freely participate in or host an auction if and only if they have registered at the agent center. Analyses demonstrate that our auction system not only resolves the problems in Xiong et al.'s scheme, but also provides more features with higher security.