Applications of Smart-Contracts: Anonymous Decentralized Insurances with IoT Sensors

Abstract

Insurances are a way of financial risk mitigation that pay the user in case of damage. However, once the event happens, the user does not get paid immediately due to the large degree of human interaction required. In this paper, we automate insurance payment by using smart contracts. As additional contribution, our design supports integration of IoT devices to register events that trigger insurance contracts and offers additional privacy-protection even on public blockchains. In order to allow users to retrieve their payment from the insurance contract anonymously we remove the linkability and traceability between events that triggers the contract and the insurance holder by applying ring signatures. Using a prototypical implementation based on Ethereum, we study the additional overhead and cost that our design incurs and can show that exploiting latest features of Ethereum, gas cost can be driven down substantially compared to earlier approaches. In sum, we propose, implement, and evaluate a design for smart insurance contracts integrating IoT sensors and including additional privacy protection using ring signatures.