Blockchain-Based Ride-Sharing System with Accurate Matching and Privacy-Preservation

Ride-sharing is a service that enables drivers to share trips with riders, which leads to several benefits such as sharing the travel cost and reducing traffic congestion. However, most of the existing ride-sharing systems rely on a central trusted unit to organize the service, which makes them subject to a single point of failure and attack, and lack of transparency. A few works have investigated decentralized ride-sharing systems, but they either do not consider privacy preservation or suffer from a tradeoff between privacy protection and accuracy due to using location cloaking technique. This paper proposes a Blockchain-based ride sharing organization system with accurate matching and privacy preservation. To achieve the accurate matching, instead of representing the ride-sharing area by a single grid, it is represented by several overlapping grids so that only near drivers/riders share rides. To preserve privacy, drivers/riders encrypt their offers/requests using a lightweight cryptosystem, and the Blockchain matches the encrypted offers and requests without being able to decrypt them. Our security and privacy analysis demonstrate that our system can organize the ride-sharing service in a secure and transparent way, and also preserve the privacy of drivers and riders. To evaluate the performance of our system, we have implemented it, and our measurements indicate that our system requires low communication and computation overheads.