Towards Trustworthy Online Sealed-Bid Auctions: Challenges and Future Directions

Abstract

Sealed-bid auctions are a fundamental mechanism for pricing across a wide range of online applications, but their deployment in online and decentralized environments raises significant security and privacy challenges. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of secure online sealed-bid auction schemes, whose primary contribution lies in a unified taxonomy, a structured comparative analysis, and an explicit identification of design trade-offs and research gaps in secure sealed-bid auction systems. We organize existing work into a taxonomy covering trusted, verifiable, confidential, fully decentralized, and identity-privacy–preserving auctions and systematically analyze their cryptographic foundations and trust assumptions. Through this comparative evaluation, we highlight fundamental trade-offs between privacy guarantees, public verifiability, and efficiency, particularly the computational cost imposed by zero-knowledge proofs and secure computation techniques. Finally, we identify key research gaps and outline future directions toward scalable, verifiable, and privacy-preserving auction designs for real-world online applications.