PRIDE: A Private and Decentralized Usage-Based Insurance Using Blockchain

Abstract

Usage-based Insurance (UBI) for vehicles determines the insurance premiums according to actual usage and driving pattern. It can significantly reduce insurance costs for safe drivers, however, UBI schemes require detailed driving data to determine the insurance premiums, which may lead to serious privacy breach for drivers. Moreover, most existing UBI schemes require a centralized insurance company as the intermediary to manage insurances. Such a centralized solution incurs too much monetary costs as well as time cost. In this paper, we propose PRIDE, a privacy-preserving and decentralized UBI scheme using the blockchain to record encrypted driving data, and the smart contract running on the blockchain to calculate insurance premiums. Different from existing UBI schemes, PRIDE achieves security and privacy without relying on any centralized party or any trusted/tamper-proof hardware. We have analyzed security of PRIDE and evaluated its performance. The results show that PRIDE is very efficient in processing UBI insurances - each insurance request can be processed in about 898ms.