A Secure E-Tender Submission Protocol

There is fundamental difference between a simple e-tender box and a traditional physical tender box. Access to the e-tender box has become a private activity in contrast with the public access to a traditional tender box. A significant opportunity is therefore created for malicious business collusion by use of a simple e-tender box even though it may have cryptographic keys. This indicates that a different approach to the e-tender box is needed. This paper presents a secure e-tender submission protocol to address the advanced security requirements in e-tender submission. The principles of commitment schemes have been applied to the protocol design to prevent submission time dispute and collusion between favoured parties. The protocol is assumed to run under the condition that all tendering parties (principal and tenderers) are dishonest players. The security analysis shows that the protocol meets its security goals under well known colluding scenarios.