Electronic Auctions with Private Bids

Auctions are a fundamental electronic commerce technology. We describe a set of protocols for performing sealed-bid electronic auctions which preserve the privacy of the submitted bids using a form of secure distributed computation. Bids are never revealed to any party, even after the auction is completed. Both first-price and second-price (Vickrey) auctions are supported, and the computational costs of the methods are low enough to allow their use in many real-world auction situations.