Abstract
The popularity of ride-hailing services (RHS) has increased all over the world as well as awareness of privacy preservation of (PP) end-users. A number of PP-RHS solutions have been proposed in the literature. Some involve a service provider (SP), while others provide a decentralized mechanism. A decentralized RHS protocol by Shen et al. was published in IEEE Systems Journal (2023) that aims to provide secure ride-matching without involving any trusted third party. Their protocol makes use of a public-key encryption scheme with an equality test and a blockchain with smart contracts. They provide a theoretical analysis of their protocol and experimental results to show that their implementation is efficient and practical. In their protocol, to provide an efficient matching scheme, the area of operation, like a city, is partitioned into zones. In the first step of their protocol, the authorized, public blockchain takes the encrypted zone ID information of the driver and rider as input to an oblivious rider-driver match protocol to provide ride matching, without revealing anything about the zone ID. In this paper, we show that an eavesdropper will be able to learn the zone IDs of all the participating users, thus negating one of the main security claims of the aforementioned RHS protocol.
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Acknowledgment
This work was partly supported by the Infosys Foundation Career Development Chair Professorship grant for the third author (Srinivas Vivek).
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Murthy, S., Upadhyaya, S.K., Vivek, S. (2025). Zone Recovery Attack on a Secure Privacy-Preserving Ride-Matching Protocol. In: Patil, V.T., Krishnan, R., Shyamasundar, R.K. (eds) Information Systems Security. ICISS 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15416. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-80020-7_19
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