Safety Warning! Decentralised and Automated Incentives for Disqualified Drivers Auditing in Ride-Hailing Services

Since 2011, the private ride-hailing companies Didi (2019), Uber (2019) and Lyft (2021) have expanded into more and more cities. These ride-hailing services (RHS) bring convenience to our life; however, at the same time they, also raise security concerns for users. For example, several recent news items show that a considerable number of registered drivers whose licenses have been revoked are still taking RHS orders on the respective platforms; this phenomenon directly leads to insecurity on part of its users and the bad reputation of the ride-hailing service provider (SP). The traditional solution to solve this problem is to periodically check the validity of the drivers’ licenses; however, it is a considerably time-consuming and costly process since the SPs have to manually interact with the governing authorities. Therefore, in this paper, we have presented an auditable self-sovereign identity system (named AudiSSI), which provides an efficient approach for the SPs to manage their registered drivers’ qualifications in a decentralized and automatic manner. Further, using smart contract technology, we propose a safety guarantee insurance in the form of an auditing contract to enable the RHS rider to check their driver's qualifications before the trip starts and get incentives once they detect a disqualified driver. We designed an incentive mechanism and have provided a game theoretical analysis. Finally, we implemented a prototype of AudiSSI and deployed it on Hyperledger Indy and Fabric to show that self-sovereign identity system for RHS driver with qualification auditing is efficient and technically feasible.