A secure blockchain-based housing rental platform

Abstract

In the housing rental market, some intermediaries often publish malicious rental prices or provide false housing information, taking advantage of the asymmetry and opacity of the rental market, to harm the interests of tenants. Blockchain has the characteristics of decentralization, immutability, and trustworthiness, which can well address the problems faced in the housing rental market. In this paper, we establish a secure transaction platform for housing rental based on blockchain. First of all, we replace the trusted third party in the traditional house rental platform using the blockchain technology to reduce the trust cost of the platform. Then, we adopt an identity access mechanism based on zero-knowledge proof to ensure the identity legality of users in the housing rental platform. Finally, homomorphic encryption algorithms are employed to protect the private information of users in the process of housing transactions. The evaluation results show that the proposed scheme can well solve the drawbacks of the traditional housing rental platform and ensure the safety of transactions between the rental parties on the platform.