Purging the Back-Room Dealing: Secure Spectrum Auction Leveraging Paillier Cryptosystem

Microeconomics-inspired spectrum auctions can dramatically improve the spectrum utilization for wireless networks to satisfy the ever increasing service demands. However, the back-room dealing (i.e., the frauds of the insincere auctioneer and the bid-rigging between the greedy bidders and the auctioneer) poses significant security challenges, and fails all existing secure auction designs to allocate spectrum bands when considering the frequency reuse in wireless networks. In this paper, we propose THEMIS, a secure spectrum auction leveraging the Paillier cryptosystem to prevent the frauds of the insincere auctioneer as well as the bid-rigging between the bidders and the auctioneer. THEMIS incorporates cryptographic technique into spectrum auction to address the challenges of back-room dealing. It computes and reveals the results of spectrum auction while the actual bidding values of bidders are kept confidential. THEMIS also provides a novel procedure for implementing secure spectrum auction under interference constraints. It has been shown that THEMIS can effectively purge the back-room dealing with limited communication and computational complexity, and achieve similar performance compared with existing insecure spectrum auction designs in terms of spectrum utilization, revenue of the auctioneer, and bidders' satisfaction.