Hawk and Aucitas: e-auction schemes from the Helios and Civitas e-voting schemes

Adam McCarthy

Abstract: The cryptographic foundations of e-auction and e-voting schemes are similar, for instance, seminal works in both domains have applied mixnets, homomorphic encryption, and trapdoor bit-commitments. However, these developments have appeared independently – for example, the adoption of mixnets in e-voting preceded a similar adoption in e-auctions by over two decades – and the two research communities are disjoint. In this paper, we demonstrate a relation between e-auction and e-voting: we present Hawk and Aucitas, two e-auction schemes derived from the Helios and Civitas e-voting schemes. Our results make progress towards the unification of the e-auction and e-voting domains, thereby paving the way for developments in e-voting to be capitalised upon in the development of e-auctions.