SPCTR: Sealed Auction-Based Procurement for Closest Pre-Tender with Range Validation

Over the past decades, there have existed extensive research works on the designs of the closest pre-tender procurement bidding. However, most solutions for the closest pre-tender only target at economic benefits while omitting the problem of bid privacy leakage. Moreover, existing works fail to provide approaches with adequate security and high efficiency. In this paper, for the first time, we propose SPCTR, a sealed-price auction-based procurement bidding system for the closest pre-tender with range validation. SPCTR allows a range validation for a supplier’s bid without leaking the secret bid. Besides, SPCTR achieves a sealed-price comparison with the pre-tender to find the closest pre-tender bid. Compared with previous works, SPCTR provides strong privacy protection for the bids of suppliers without sacrificing high efficiency. SPCTR is constructed based on carefully designed cryptographic tools with generality and simplicity which enable various operations on the encrypted values, and these tools can be easily applied to other contexts. We not only formally prove that SPCTR is secure against semihonest adversaries but also comprehensively analyze the efficiency. Experimental results validate that SPCTR achieves procurement bidding with light computation time and communication cost in practice.