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

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