booking and payments system, named SC
2
Share.
SC
2
Share works along the existing car access pro-
vision protocols such as SePCAR and uses a smart
contract to register car sharing offers, match requests
and settle payments. Compared with existing sche-
mes, our system has the following advantages:
• Fair. Our system provides better fairness guaran-
tees as it does not suffer from centralized price
manipulation and membership exclusion.
• Resistance against Data Breach. There is no
central point of failure in our design. Most inte-
ractions happen in a peer-to-peer fashion between
the car owner and the consumer, which involves
no intermediary. Sensitive information stored on
the blockchain is encrypted with the receiver’s pu-
blic key, which is different for each participant.
A compromised private key will not affect other
users of the system.
• Complete Functionalities. Our system offers
complete functionalities that cover all typical exe-
cution paths in an Uber car sharing instance, in-
cluding several conflict handling capabilities that
ensure financial safety of each involved party
against an adversary, the other party, and miso-
peration by the user himself. To the best of our
knowledge, these combination of features is not
offered in any existing decentralized car sharing
platform.
• Cost-effective. As an additional advantage, our
system is more cost effective to use due to the ab-
sence of a commission. The only cost involved
is the deployment and transaction costs incurred
by the blockchain. The experiments with our de-
ployed contract in Ethereum testnet highlights the
operational costs and efficiency of SC
2
Share.
The remainder of this paper is organized as fol-
lows. Section 2 presents the necessary background.
Section 3 presents the system model, threat model and
design requirements used in our design. Section 4
describes SC
2
Share, followed by its evaluation in
Section 5. Finally, Section 6 concludes this paper and
it offers future research directions.
2 BACKGROUND
Since SC
2
Share handles only the booking and pay-
ments aspect of car sharing, we first give a brief over-
view of SePCAR, a secure and privacy-enhancing car
access provision protocol to generate and revoke car
access tokens (Symeonidis et al., 2017). Then, we
briefly introduce smart contracts in Ethereum - the
main building block of SC
2
Share.
2.1 SePCAR
SePCAR (Symeonidis et al., 2017) is a car sharing
scheme that offers strong security and privacy proper-
ties; it extends earlier work described in (Symeonidis
et al., 2016). The system consists of various functio-
nal components. We only list the ones that are rele-
vant to our system. An Owner is a user who is willing
to share his car, a consumer is the user who wants to
rent a car and authorities are the entities responsible
for ensuring that the entire system is legal as well as
for resolving any disputes between users.
The SePCAR protocol starts with the mutual
agreement of booking details by the owner and con-
sumer. Due to the presence of sensitive information
such as the identities of the owner, consumer and the
car along with its usage duration and location, the
system server encrypts these booking details and an
access token is generated. This access token is then
stored in a public ledger, where it is retrieved by the
consumer. Subsequently, a consumer uses this token
to access the car without revealing his private infor-
mation. SePCAR also guarantees the confidentiality
of the car key and booking details.
2.2 Smart Contracts in Ethereum
Ethereum is a cryptocurrency with the third largest
market capitalization (CoinMarketCap, 2018). Ai-
ming at realizing a “world computer”, Ethereum al-
lows users to program smart contracts with a Turing-
complete language and guarantees the correct execu-
tion of these contracts and the integrity of the system
with its underlying blockchain (Buterin, 2014).
Smart contracts are special accounts on Ethereum
blockchain, that contain code and persistant storage
along with an address and balance like normal ac-
counts (Luu et al., 2017). They are computerized pro-
tocols, that, without relying on any intermediaries, sa-
tisfy contractual conditions and minimize attacks by
adversaries. As in any other computer program, the
code of smart contracts also manipulates variables,
and it can be invoked by sending a transaction to its
address along with the required payment for its exe-
cution and parameters.
Miners, entities who embed transactions into the
blockchain, are compensated by transaction fees in
ether, the native currency of Ethereum, from the tran-
saction initiators. The transaction fee is calculated as
the total amount of gas consumed by the transaction
execution, multiplied by the gasPrice, while the gas-
ether exchange rate is specified in the transaction. The
total gas is calculated by accumulating the gas con-
sumption of all instructions of the execution. Each
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