An Agent-Based English Auction Protocol Using Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem for Mobile Commerce

Abstract

With the rapid development of Internet and the extensive Use of mobile phones, the demand for the use of mobile devices in Internet auctions has increased. Because of this trend, there is an incentive to develop an auction model that is to be used on a mobile-based environment. Recently, Kuo-Hsuan Huang proposed a mobile auction agent model (MoAAM), which allows the bidders to participate in online auctions through a mobile agent. Huang used modular exponentiation operations in his method; however, it would increase the processing time for key generation, bidding, and verification. Thus, we propose to add the concept of Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem (ECC) onto MoAAM, because ECC is able to provide low computation amount and small key size. It would aid to increase the speed in generating keys, bidding, and verification. In terms of reduction of computation load on mobile devices and auction-manager server load, the proposed method will make online auction system become more convenient for users. This paper mainly uses the English auction protocol as the key auction protocol. The protocol consists of four entities: Registration Manager, Agent House, Auction House and Bidder. Especially, our proposed method conforms to the requirements of an online auction protocol, like anonymity, public verifiability, one-time registration, etc.