A New Quantum Sealed-Bid Auction Protocol with a Set of Local Indistinguishable Orthogonal Product States

Abstract

Quantum sealed-bid auction (QSA) is a special form of transaction with significant applications in the economic and financial fields. Using a unique set of locally indistinguishable orthogonal product (LIOP) states, we propose a new QSA protocol in this paper. In the protocol, the bid message is encoded as a quantum sequence of LIOP states, and the different particles of LIOP states are transmitted separately. Even though an attacker obtains a portion of the particles, they cannot recover the entire bid message because of the local indistinguishability of LIOP states. Once the auctioneer announces the winner’s bid, all bidders are able to confirm the authenticity of their bid. With the help of a semi-honest third party, collusion between the auctioneer and a malicious bidder can be discovered. Finally, our protocol is capable of meeting all requirements for secure sealed-bid auctions through security and completeness analysis. Additionally, the proposed protocol does not require any entangled resources and complicated operations, so it can be easily implemented in practice.