Cloud-based Privacy-Preserving Collaborative Consumption for Sharing Economy

TL;DR

This paper introduces privacy-preserving protocols for sharing economy applications on the cloud, enabling fair cost-sharing and schedule privacy using homomorphic encryption, with practical evaluation and prototype implementation.

Contribution

It presents novel cloud-based privacy-preserving protocols based on homomorphic encryption for collaborative consumption, ensuring user privacy and fair cost-sharing without third-party involvement.

Findings

Protocols effectively protect user schedules and demands.

System prototype demonstrates practical feasibility.

Evaluation confirms protocol efficiency and privacy preservation.

Abstract

Cloud computing has been a dominant paradigm for a variety of information processing platforms, particularly for enabling various popular applications of sharing economy. However, there is a major concern regarding data privacy on these cloud-based platforms. This work presents novel cloud-based privacy-preserving solutions to support collaborative consumption applications for sharing economy. In typical collaborative consumption, information processing platforms need to enable fair cost-sharing among multiple users for utilizing certain shared facilities and communal services. Our cloud-based privacy-preserving protocols, based on homomorphic Paillier cryptosystems, can ensure that the cloud-based operator can only obtain an aggregate schedule of all users in facility sharing, or a service schedule conforming to service provision rule in communal service sharing, but is unable to track the personal schedules or demands of individual users. More importantly, the participating users are still able to settle cost-sharing among themselves in a fair manner for the incurred costs, without knowing each other's private schedules or demands. Our privacy-preserving protocols involve no other third party who may compromise privacy. We also provide an extensive evaluation study and a proof-of-concept system prototype of our protocols.