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

这个小企业创新研究(SBIR)项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力是加强当今金融(密码或传统)交易所和拍卖平台的安全和隐私控制。目前，这类交易所受到信息泄露的影响，这意味着第三方可以看到竞价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(即领先)竞争对手。一个相关的问题是交流缺乏透明度，这往往是由于它们努力限制信息泄露造成的。缺乏透明度导致了几个中央交易所出现重大问题。该项目建议建立一个创新的去中心化交易所，为交易者提供一个公平和高效的市场。建议的解决方案将采用基于安全多方计算(MPC)的最先进的密码协议，以确保必要的机密性而不损害透明度。该项目不受安全和透明度之间的权衡--它将寻求在一个有效的系统中提供两者。此外，在该项目下开发的工具将具有金融部门以外的潜力，包括改进安全和私下处理敏感数据的方法。此SBIR第一阶段项目通过将安全多方计算(MPC)扩展到大量各方来研究分散市场的设计。MPC为执行拍卖提供了一种分散的解决方案，由于协议只允许中标者(或投标人)向任何人透露，拍卖自动地在前端运行。拟议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货币政策控制离链，并在保证最大安全性的同时，以最低的交易费用在链上证明结果。所提出的方案将利用量子安全原语和星形网络拓扑来获得稳健的安全性和最小的通信开销。在这个项目中，第一个验证设计拍卖MPC的应用程序将是一个从L2到L1的分散式不可替代令牌(NFT)市场和即时退出机制。该裁决反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.