B-Ride: Ride Sharing with Privacy-preservation, Trust and Fair Payment atop Public Blockchain

Ride-sharing is a service that enables drivers to share their trips with other riders, contributing to appealing benefits of shared travel costs. However, the majority of existing platforms rely on a central third party, which make them subject to a single point of failure and privacy disclosure issues. Moreover, they are vulnerable to DDoS and Sybil attacks due to malicious users involvement. Besides, high fees should be paid to the service provider. In this paper, we propose a decentralized ride-sharing service based on public Blockchain, named B-Ride. Both riders and drivers can find rides match while preserving their trip data, including pick-up/drop-off location, and departure/arrival date. However, under the anonymity of the public blockchain, a malicious user may submit multiple ride requests or offers, while not committing to any of them, to discover better offer or to make the system unreliable. B-Ride solves this problem by introducing a time-locked deposit protocol for a ride-sharing by leveraging smart contract and zero-knowledge set membership proof. In a nutshell, both a driver and a rider have to show their commitment by sending a deposit to the blockchain. Later, a driver has to prove to the blockchain on the agreed departure time that he has arrived at the pick-up location. To preserve rider/driver location privacy by hiding the exact pick-up location, the proof is done using zero-knowledge set membership protocol. Moreover, to ensure a fair payment, a pay-as-you-drive methodology is introduced based on the elapsed distance of the driver and the rider. Also, we introduce a reputation-based trust model to rate drivers based on their past trips to allow riders to select them based on their history on the system. Finally, we implement B-Ride in a test net of Ethereum. The experiment results show the applicability of our protocol atop the existing real-world blockchain.