SIGCOMM preview: Verifiable auctions for online ad exchanges

Ad exchanges are critical players in the online advertising ecosystem that mediate the real-time buying and selling of online ads. Currently, all transactions in ad exchanges proceed on the premise that ad exchanges have a well-established reputation and are therefore trustworthy. This paper argues that this paradigm disenfranchises publishers and advertisers, and proposes ways to remove some of that trust. To do so, it presents a mechanism to make ad exchanges' actions verifiable, while conforming to the strict requirements posed by the online advertising ecosystem (e.g., millions of latency-sensitive transactions per second).

Link: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~sebs/papers/vex-sigcomm13.pdf