Constructing secret, verifiable auction schemes from election schemes

Auctions and elections are seemingly disjoint research fields. Nevertheless, we observe that similar cryptographic primitives are used in both fields. For instance, mixnets, homomorphic encryption, and trapdoor bitcommitments, have been used by state-of-the-art schemes in both fields. These developments have appeared independently. For example, the adoption of mixnets in elections preceded a similar adoption in auctions by over two decades. In this paper, we demonstrate a relation between auctions and elections: we present a generic construction for auctions from election schemes. Moreover, we show that the construction guarantees secrecy and verifiability, assuming the underlying election scheme satisfies secrecy and verifiability. We demonstrate the applicability of our work by deriving an auction scheme from the Helios election scheme. Our results inaugurate the unification of auctions and elections, thereby facilitating the advancement of both fields.