Bayesian-Based Inference Attack Method and Individual Differential Privacy-Based Auction Mechanism for Double Auction Market

Due to high convenience and efficiency, electronic auction technology has been developed rapidly and has been applied to many online trading market applications. As more attention has been paid to information security, the privacy issues in the electronic auction have been widely studied. Differential privacy, as a lightweight privacy protection method, is an important direction in privacy preserving auction mechanism designing. However, most of the existing researches on differential privacy-based auction mechanism have not proposed a theoretical privacy inference attack method against the auction market. Therefore, the existence of privacy attacks is questionable, and the necessity and privacy protection performance of the existing differential privacy auction mechanism cannot be verified. To this end, in this paper we addressed the privacy attack issue and privacy protection issue in the auction market simultaneously. First, a Bayesian-based inference attack method against the double auction market was proposed from the perspective of the adversary. Theoretical analysis and evaluation results showed that the proposed inference attack method can effectively infer the bidding information of the target bidders, and attack success rate achieved approximately 95%. Second, an individual differential privacy-based auction mechanism was proposed from the perspective of the auction platform. Since not all the bidders will be attacked, we introduced the concept of individual differential privacy to provide targeted defense for specific bidders. Theoretical analysis demonstrated that the proposed auction mechanism satisfies 2(pi)-individual differential privacy. And the extensive evaluation results showed that, compared with the existing differential privacy-based auction mechanism, our proposed mechanism provided the best privacy protection performance, that is, reduced the attack success rate to 20%, and ensured better auction performance, such as social welfare and satisfaction ratio, than the other mechanisms.