A Privacy-Preserving Ride Matching Scheme for Ride Sharing Services in a Hot Spot Area

Ride sharing is a service that enables users to share trips with others, conserving energy, decreasing emissions and reducing traffic congestion. Selecting a suitable partner for a user based on the their trip data is essential for the service, but it also leads to privacy disclosure, e.g., the user's location and trajectory. Many privacy-preserving solutions for ride sharing services have been proposed, which are based on cryptographic technology and provide accurate matching services. However, these encryption-based algorithms are very complicated and difficult to calculate. In hot spots, such as stations, airports and sport gymnasiums, a large number of users may apply for a ride sharing service in short space of time, which will place huge pressure on the service provider. Using traditional matching methods increases the matching time and leads to a less favorable user experience. To solve these problems, we model them, aiming to maximize the vehicle's carrying capacity and propose a lightweight privacy-preserving ride matching scheme for selecting feasible partners during busy periods with a large number of requests. To achieve this, we make use of the homomorphic encryption technique to hide location data and design a scheme to calculate the distances between users in road networks securely and efficiently. We employ a road network embedding technique to calculate the distance between users. Moreover, we use travel time instead of space distance, which makes matching more accurate. Further, with the encrypted itineraries of users, the service provider selects potential ride share partners according to the feasibility of time schedules. We use ciphertext packing to reduce overhead, improving the efficiency of ride matching. Finally, we evaluate our scheme with simulation and demonstrate that our scheme achieves an efficient and accurate matching service. It only takes a few seconds to complete the matching, and the matching accuracy is higher than 85 percent in most cases.