Bidirectional Authentication for Safe Ridesharing Empowered by Permissioned Blockchain

Ridesharing and on-demand mobility systems offer societal benefits that include reduced traffic, lower parking demand and less environmental impact from vehicle usage. However, the problem of user impersonation has compromised the safety of both riders and drivers, sometimes ending in fatal tragedy. To address the safety concerns resulting from user impersonation, this paper proposes a blockchain-based and zero-knowledge approach for decentralized and privacy-preserving identity verification in ridesharing. The proposed permissioned blockchain facilitates our privacy-aware verification scheme and provides fine-grained access control policies to protect on-chain trip records. We developed the proposed system on the Hyperledger Fabric platform, with Chaincode smart contracts and Hyperledger Ursa cryptographic library. To measure the performance of the system, we conduct extensive experiments utilizing the Hyperledger Caliper benchmark tool. Our results show that the zero-knowledge proof module can perform the privacy-preserving identity verification at the millisecond level while the blockchain network offers low latency and high throughput for transactions. The non-resource-intensive authentication scheme and the proposed secure-by-design blockchain with access control policies make the proposed approach fitting for application in real-world ridesharing environments.