Abstract: During the sealed auction process, collusion attacks are prone to occur, and the privacy information of bidders needs to be protected. To address this issue, a quantum sealed-bid auction protocol based on quantum homomorphic message authentication is proposed. This protocol introduces a semi-honest third party with certain malicious behavior as the intermediary and verifier, which is responsible not only for transmitting information between the bidders and the auctioneer, but also for verifying the auction results to ensure fairness and impartiality. In the protocol, before sending a bid, the bidder needs to first send the encrypted bid commitment to the third party, which will process it and then send it to the auctioneer. The auctioneer who receives the information will verify the identities of the bidders, confirm the source of the information, decrypt the information, and finally use the results to determine whether someone has tampered with the bid during the process. The experimental results reveal that the application of quantum homomorphic message authentication scheme and the introduction of a semi-honest third party in the auction process can not only avoid collusive attacks, but also effectively protect the privacy of bidders.

Key words: quantum sealed-bid auction, quantum homomorphic message authentication, a semi-honest third party, collusion attacks