Blockchain-Based Sealed-Bid Domain Name Auction Protocol

• Published in: Applied Cryptography in Computer and Communications pp. 25 - 38
• Main Authors: Lu, Genhua, Zhang, Yi, Lu, Zhongxiang, Shao, Jun, Wei, Guiyi
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering
• Subjects: Blockchain; DNS; Sealed-bid auction
• ISBN: 9783030808501; 3030808505
• ISSN: 1867-8211; 1867-822X
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-80851-8_3

Domain name system (DNS), mapping domain names to IP addresses, is critical to the Internet’s running. However, the centralized architecture is one of the major criticisms of the current DNS. Many works suggest introducing the blockchain into DNS, but the existing blockchain-based DNSs do not support the domain name auction that is important for the domain name transfer. To solve this problem, we in this paper propose a blockchain-based sealed-bid domain name auction protocol by combining the smart contract, the Pedersen commitment, and zero-knowledge proof. Compared with the previous blockchain-based auction protocols, our proposal is the first one holding the tx-fairness, bidding-fairness, bid-guarantee, and fund-privacy at the same time. For showing its effectiveness, we also give an illustration of our proposal based on the smart contract system in Ethereum.