A Privacy-Preserving Peer-to-Peer Accommodation System Based on a Credit Network

While Peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodations like Airbnb bring huge convenience and unique experiences to our daily life, a guest taking a P2P accommodation may face great risks, because he/she cannot check the quality of the accommodation before it starts, resulting in a bad experience. Although current P2P accommodation platforms use rating systems and arbitrations to solve the problems, they may not be practical in reality, since interpersonal expectations and interactions between a guest and a host play an important role in rating a P2P accommodation. In this paper, we introduce a new technique based on a credit network to solve these problems. A credit network is a network that uses currency to model transitive trust (or credit) between different users in a distributed fashion. It is modified from the current Bitcoin-based credit network by using a trusted hardware and a protocol for a guest to book a P2P accommodation without revealing unnecessary private information of either the guest or the host with high efficiency. Security and performance analysis shows that our scheme can help a guest find a trustworthy host in a privacy-preserving way, while still achieving high efficiency.