ARMOR: A Secure Combinatorial Auction for Heterogeneous Spectrum

Dynamic spectrum allocation via auction is an effective solution to spectrum shortage. Combinatorial spectrum auction enables buyers to express diversified preferences towards different combinations of channels. Despite the effort to ensure truthfulness and maximize social welfare, spectrum auction also faces potential security risks. The leakage of sensitive information such as true valuation and location of bidders may incur severe economic damage. However, there is a lack of works that can provide sufficient protection against such security risks in combinatorial spectrum auction. In this paper, we propose ARMOR, to enable combinatorial auction for heterogeneous spectrum with privacy, which can preserve bidders’ privacy while guaranteeing the economic-robustness of the combinatorial auction. We leverage the cryptographic methods, including homomorphic encryption, order-preserving encryption, and garbled circuits, to shield the bid and location information of buyers from the auctioneer. We design a novel location protection algorithm, which allows the auctioneer to exploit spectrum reuse opportunities without knowing the exact locations of buyers. Furthermore, we propose a verifiable payment scheme based on digital signature to prevent the auctioneer from forging the payment. The extensive experiments confirm that ARMOR maintains the good performance of the combinatorial spectrum auction, in terms of buyer satisfactory ratio and social welfare, and achieves privacy preservation with acceptable computation and communication costs.