CoRide: A Privacy-Preserving Collaborative-Ride Hailing Service Using Blockchain-Assisted Vehicular Fog Computing

Ride-hailing services have experienced remarkable development throughout the world, serving millions of users per day. However, service providers, such as Uber and Didi, operate independently. If they are willing to share user data and establish collaborative-rides (c-rides), more ride services and commercial interests will be produced. Meanwhile, these collaborations raise significant security and privacy concerns for both users and service providers, because users’ sensitive information and service providers’ business secrets could be leaked during c-rides. Moreover, data auditability and fairness must be guaranteed. In this paper, we propose CoRide: a privacy-preserving Collaborative-Ride hailing service using blockchain-assisted vehicular fog computing. First, we anonymously authenticate users and disclose a targeted user only if all collaborative service providers are present while requiring no trusted authority. Then, we construct a consortium blockchain to record c-rides and create smart contracts to pair riders with drivers. Private proximity test and query processing are utilized to support location authentication, driver screening and destination matching. Last, we modify Zerocash to achieve anonymous payment and defend double spending attacks. Finally, we analyze the security of CoRide and demonstrate its efficiency through extensive experiments based on an Ethereum network.