Privacy Preserving Auction Based Virtual Machine Instances Allocation Scheme for Cloud Computing Environment

Abstract

Cloud Computing Environment provides computing resources in the form of Virtual Machines (VMs), to the cloud users through Internet. Auction-based VM instances allocation allows different cloud users to participate in an auction for a bundle of Virtual Machine instances where the user with the highest bid value will be selected as the winner by the auctioneer (Cloud Service Provider) to gain more. In this auction mechanism, individual bid values are revealed to the auctioneer in order to select the winner as a result of which privacy of bid values are lost. In this paper, we proposed an auction scheme to select the winner without revealing the individual bid values to the auctioneer to maintain privacy of bid values. The winner will get the access to the bundle of VM instances. This  scheme relies on a set of cryptographic protocols including Oblivious Transfer (OT) protocol and Yao’s protocol to maintain privacy of bid values.