Uncoercible e-Bidding Games

Abstract.

The notion of uncoercibility was first introduced in e-voting systems to deal with the coercion of voters. However this notion extends to many other e-systems for which the privacy of users must be protected, even if the users wish to undermine their own privacy. In this paper we consider uncoercible e-bidding games. We discuss necessary requirements for uncoercibility, and present a general uncoercible e-bidding game that distributes the bidding procedure between the bidder and a tamper-resistant token in a verifiable way. We then show how this general scheme can be used to design provably uncoercible e-auctions and e-voting systems. Finally, we discuss the practical consequences of uncoercibility in other areas of e-commerce.

Keywords: Uncoercibility, e-bidding games, e-auctions, e-voting, e-commerce

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