Leilão de Vickrey Confidencial com FHE em Blockchain Pública
Resumo
Sealed-bid auctions assume that each participant decides their bid without knowing the others’, but public blockchains expose every transaction in the mempool and in the permanent history, enabling frontrunning and strategy leakage. The prevailing workaround, the commit-reveal scheme, requires two transactions and reveals the losing bids at the end. This paper presents the implementation of a Vickrey (second-price sealed-bid) auction on Fhenix CoFHE, a Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) platform for smart contracts, in which bids remain encrypted end to end. An incremental top-2 pattern solves the homomorphic computation of the second price with constant cost and storage per bid, handling ties with no additional structures. The evaluation on a public testnet (Arbitrum Sepolia) measures gas, calldata, and latency with 3, 5, and 10 participants, compares the pattern against an𝑂(𝑁) homomorphic-mask baseline implemented and measured in the same environment, and a leakage analysis quantifies in bits the adversary’s residual uncertainty: about 95% of the uncertainty over the unrevealed bids survives settlement. The contract, the web interface with in-browser encryption, and the measurement data are public and reproducible.
Referências
Daniel Aronoff, Adithya Bhat, Panagiotis Chatzigiannis, Mohsen Minaei, Srinivasan Raghuraman, Robert M. Townsend, and Nicolas Xuan-Yi Zhang. 2025. SoK: Fully-homomorphic encryption in smart contracts. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2025/527. [link]
Felix Brandt. 2006. How to obtain full privacy in auctions. International Journal of Information Security 5, 4 (Sept. 2006), 201–216. DOI: 10.1007/s10207-006-0001-y
Ilaria Chillotti, Nicolas Gama, Mariya Georgieva, and Malika Izabachène. 2020. TFHE: Fast Fully Homomorphic Encryption Over the Torus. Journal of Cryptology 33, 1 (2020), 34–91. IACR ePrint 2018/421, [link]. DOI: 10.1007/s00145-019-09319-x
Philip Daian, Steven Goldfeder, Tyler Kell, Yunqi Li, Xueyuan Zhao, Iddo Bentov, Lorenz Breidenbach, and Ari Juels. 2020. Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning in Decentralized Exchanges, Miner Extractable Value, and Consensus Instability. In 2020 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP). IEEE, 910–927. arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.05234, [link]. DOI: 10.1109/SP40000.2020.00040
Thiago Rocha Duarte. 2026. fhe-vickrey-auction: leilão de Vickrey confidencial com FHE em blockchain pública. GitHub. [link]. Contrato Solidity, interface web, suíte de testes e dados de medição.
Faruukku. 2026. Vickrey, Confidentiality, and Zama: Building Sealed-Bid Auctions on Encrypted Blockchains. Medium. Acesso em: 26 abr. 2026. [link]
Fhenix. 2026. Fhenix: building the Future of Private DeFi on Ethereum with FHE. [link]. Site oficial da plataforma.
Fhenix. 2026. poc-sealed-bid-auction: Sealed Bid Auction with FHE. GitHub. [link]. Proof-of-concept oficial de leilão selado de primeiro preço em Fhenix CoFHE.
Hisham S. Galal and Amr M. Youssef. 2018. Verifiable Sealed-Bid Auction on the Ethereum Blockchain. In Financial Cryptography and Data Security: FC 2018 InternationalWorkshops, BITCOIN, VOTING, andWTSC (Nieuwpoort, Curaçao) (WTSC 2018 (2nd Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts)), Aviv Zohar, Ittay Eyal, Vanessa Teague, Jeremy Clark, Andrea Bracciali, Federico Pintore, and Massimiliano Sala (Eds.). Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, 265–278. Springer proceedings published in 2019. IACR ePrint 2018/704, [link]. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-58820-8_18
Hisham S. Galal and Amr M. Youssef. 2019. Trustee: Full Privacy Preserving Vickrey Auction on top of Ethereum. In Financial Cryptography and Data Security: 3rd Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts (WTSC) and other FC 2019 International Workshops, Andrea Bracciali, Jeremy Clark, Federico Pintore, Peter B. Rønne, and Massimiliano Sala (Eds.). Springer International Publishing, Cham, 190–207. Proceedings Springer published in 2020. IACR ePrint 2019/102, [link]. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-43725-1_14
Craig Gentry. 2009. A fully homomorphic encryption scheme. Ph.D. Dissertation. Stanford University. [link]
Vijay Krishna. 2009. Auction Theory (2 ed.). Academic Press, Burlington.
Moni Naor, Benny Pinkas, and Reuban Sumner. 1999. Privacy preserving auctions and mechanism design. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (Denver, Colorado, USA) (EC ’99). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 129–139. DOI: 10.1145/336992.337028
tomosaigon. 2024. fhenix-hardhat-vickrey: leilão de Vickrey (segundo preço) selado sobre a Fhenix legada. GitHub. [link]. Implementação pública de Vickrey em Fhenix legada, com decifração síncrona on-chain; artefato de prototipagem, sem documentação acadêmica.
William Vickrey. 1961. Counterspeculation, Auctions, and Competitive Sealed Tenders. The Journal of Finance 16, 1 (March 1961), 8–37. Also available via JSTOR, DOI: 10.2307/2977633.
Gavin Wood. 2014. Ethereum: A Secure Decentralised Generalised Transaction Ledger. Ethereum Yellow Paper. Acesso em: 28 abr. 2026. [link]
Zama. 2024. Fhevm: A cross-chain protocol for confidential smart contracts. Whitepaper. Acesso em: 26 abr. 2026. [link]
Erjun Zhou, Jing Chen, Kun He, Meng Jia, Ruiying Du, Mei Wang, and Yunyu Yao. 2024. FACT: Sealed-Bid Auction With Full Privacy via Threshold Fully Homomorphic Encryption. IEEE Transactions on Services Computing 17, 6 (Nov. 2024), 3627–3639. DOI: 10.1109/TSC.2024.3439995
