SBIR Phase I: Lightweight Scalable Auctions for Decentralized Martketplaces and Beyond

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是提高当今金融（加密或传统）交易所和拍卖平台的安全和隐私控制。 目前，这类交易所存在信息泄露的问题，这意味着第三方可以看到投标或拍卖过程的各个方面，这种能力使他们能够获得优势或不公平地出价高于竞争对手（即领先）。 一个相关的问题是交易所缺乏透明度，这往往是由于交易所努力限制信息泄露。 缺乏透明度导致了几个集中式交易所的重大问题。 该项目旨在建立一个创新的去中心化交易所，为交易者提供一个公平高效的市场。 拟议的解决方案将采用基于安全多方计算（MPC）的最先进的加密协议，以保证必要的机密性，而不影响透明度。 该项目不受安全和透明度之间的权衡的约束-它将寻求在一个有效的系统中提供这两个方面。此外，在该项目下开发的工具将具有超越金融部门的潜力，包括改进安全和私人操作敏感数据的方法。 这个SBIR第一阶段项目通过将安全多方计算（MPC）扩展到大量方来研究分散式市场的设计。MPC提供了一种去中心化的解决方案，用于执行自动抗前置运行的拍卖，因为该协议只允许获胜的出价（或出价人）向任何人透露。提出的解决方案将解决一个关键挑战，即开发一种具体有效的机制来执行MPC链下，并以最小的交易费用在链上验证结果，同时保证最大的安全性。所提出的解决方案将利用量子安全原语和星星网络拓扑结构来获得鲁棒的安全性和最小的通信开销。在这个项目中，验证所设计的拍卖MPC的第一个应用程序将是一个去中心化的不可替代令牌（NFT）市场和从L2到L1的即时退出机制。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is to increase the security and privacy controls in today's financial (crypto or traditional) exchanges and auction platforms. Currently, such exchanges suffer from information leakage, meaning that third parties can see aspects of the bidding or auction processes and this ability allows them to gain an advantage or unfairly outbid (i.e. front-run) the competition. A related issue is the lack of transparency in exchanges, which often results from their efforts to limit information leakage. The lack of transparency has led to significant issues at several centralized exchanges. This project proposes to build an innovative decentralized exchange that will empower traders with a fair and efficient marketplace. The proposed solution will employ state-of-the-art cryptographic protocols based on secure multiparty computation (MPC) to guarantee the necessary confidentiality without compromising transparency. The project is not bound by the tradeoff between security and transparency - it will seek to provide both in an efficient system. Furthermore, the tools developed under this project will have potential beyond the financial sector, including improving methods to securely and privately operate with sensitive data. This SBIR Phase I project investigates the design of a decentralized marketplace by scaling secure multiparty computation (MPC) to a large number of parties. MPC provides a decentralized solution for executing an auction that is automatically front-running resistant as the protocol only allows the winning bid (or bidder) to be revealed to anyone. The proposed solution will address a key challenge of developing a concretely efficient mechanism to execute the MPC off-chain and certify the results on-chain with minimal transaction fees while guaranteeing maximal security. The proposed solution will take advantage of quantum secure primitives and star network topology to get robust security and minimal communication overhead. In this project, the first application to validate the designed auction MPC will be a decentralized Non-Fungible Token (NFT) marketplace and instantaneous withdrawal mechanism from L2 to L1.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.