Securing Big Data for Knowledge Management into a Circular Economy

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The introduction is too short.

What are the current economic, social and ecological issues that need to be resolved immediately? Please can you list some of them.

The full meaning of the following should be provided the first time they are appearing in the article

OLAP

BI

JVM

GDP

CE 

and so on

The first table on page 4 is not label.

Author Response

The following corrections and additions have been made:

 

1. The introduction has been expanded.
2. Economic, social and ecological issues that need to be resolved immediately are listed.
3. The full meaning of the following should be provided the first time they are appearing in the article

• OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing)
• BI (Business Intelligence)
• JVM (Java Virtual Machine)
• GDP (Gross Domestic Product)
• CE (Circular Economy)

and so on.

4. The first table on page 4 is labeled.

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper presents a solution to secure BD read/write operations using the Gauss function and shows how it can use Secure Shell  (SSH), a cryptographic network protocol to generate key-value pairs for safely operating services over an unsecured network. 

My recommendations regarding the work are the following:

 

- In the following paragraph "The first step in highlighting these divisors was made by Mersenne (1644)" the bibliographic reference is not specified according to the requirements of the journal

- In the paragraph "Starting from Fermat's little theory, ..." there is no reference to the bibliographic reference in which this theory is described

- The bibliographic references must include the works containing Fermat's and Mersenne's theorems

- In figure 3, the measurement units for the OX and OY axes are not specified

- In the conclusions part, it would be necessary to emphasize the advantages of the proposed method compared to other similar methods in the field.

Author Response

 

1. "Mersenne (1644)" the bibliographic reference is specified according to the requirements of the journal.
2. In the paragraph "Starting from Fermat's little theory, ..." there is reference to the bibliographic reference in which this theory is described
3. The shape is important not the units
4. The proposed method is compared with similar methods

Reviewer 3 Report

The objective of this work is to secure data transfer. Big data, mark of Industry 4.0, comes with the risk of transferring the knowledge.

''Data management is becoming harder to be administered, and Big Data can be a good solution for it''.

Sending data containing information about actions to be taken by the system may expose the values of the system’s parameters.

=> Securing the data will stop any third party from interfering with the communication and sending its own commands to the remote system. 

 

-->the work presents a case study that proves how to secure BD read/write operations using Gauss function and how to use Secure Shell (SSH), a cryptographic network protocol to generate key-value pairs for safely operating services over an unsecured network, but there is no comparisons between this contribution and other results ?

-->Comparisons are not made as even with previous works of the authors

-->So it is assuming that it's a suggestion or an idea proposal.

I think, with the current state of this work, paper cannot be published in this journal (Sustainability) but at the beginning maybe in a conference - subject to possible discussions... then once the study is approved you can develop the idea further more in this journal.

Author Response

Dear reviewer thank you very much for your comments and recommendation. We took them seriously into account and made the appropriate changes:

For establishing the criteria for choosing the second part of the public key, the exponent e, the Euler’s totient function is computed as φ(n) = (p − 1) × (q− 1). The value of e is chosen as big as possible, as long as it is a prime number smaller than φ(n)and is not a factor of n. The private key exponent, d is computed as the least common multiple of p-1 and q-1, where the Euclidean algorithm is used for computing the greatest common divisor. For bigger p’s and q’s, the values are chosen from the last 1000 values of the set, which is offering enough distinct combinations for one million clients.

...

Compared with an implementation of a classical algorithm, which needed an average time (over 10 runs) of 674 ms for computing primes with an xmax upper limit of 1000, the optimized implementation needed only 278.52 ms for the same limit, in the same conditions, and 16.85 sec for xmax = 10000, please see  Figure 5. Generating primes up to 10000

...

As shown in the research conducted in this paper, it is critical to define pairs of keys based on large prime numbers to improve the security of data/knowledge transfer to the highest possible level and to reduce the risk of data corruption and leakage to a minimum. All of the above points converge to the fact that BigData access should mainly be granted through NoSQL data storage systems using BigTables columnar architecture (e.g. HBase) for secured knowledge transfer.

Also, the comparison is reaffirmed with papers named below and the conclusion is shortly shown. This is a new method and it is a chance that it can be used in the future as the most efficient method in generating SSH-key-based authentication, but there is still a lot to work on the algorithm in the future.  

Kaighobadi, K., Fernandez, E. B., A Pattern for the Secure Shell Protocol, 1st LACCEI International Symposium on Software Architecture and Patterns (LACCEI-ISAP-MiniPLoP’2012), July 23-27, 2012, Panama City, Panama.

Ramakrishna, P., Harivamsi, R., Sujan, K., Vijayakumar, P.,  Jagannath M FPGA Implementation of Hybrid Asymmetric key based Digital Signature and Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange Algorithm for IoT Application, International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics, 10.1504/ijesdf.2022.10043513, 2022, Vol 1 (1), pp. 1

Cordially,

The authors

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Good improvement

Author Response

Thank you very much for your recommendations.

Reviewer 3 Report

Table 1, Figure 1 and 3 must be  redone because the screenshots are not presentable

Author Response

Thank you very much for your recommendations,

I have changed the table and figures that needed my attention, please see below:

• Table 1. RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is like NoSQL data redundancy model for performance improvement.
• Figure 1. New HBase data record.

• Figure 3. π(x)/x distribution of data variation is close to that of 1/ ln(x) function.

I have also completed the Conclusions section with our technical assessment and results:

The efficiency of the algorithm was measured using sys/time.h C library. Thus, we called clock_gettime function with start/end parameters before the main loop is executed, and after the cnt_prime function returns the last value, respectively:

    // start timer:

    clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, &start);

    // unsync the I/O:

    ios_base::sync_with_stdio(false);

   

    for (int d = 2;d<= 10000;d++)

    {

                   cnt_prime(d);

    }            

    // stop timer:

    clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, &end);

    // calculating the amount of time taken by the execution:

    double time_taken;

    time_taken = (end.tv_sec - start.tv_sec) * 1e9;

    time_taken = (time_taken + (end.tv_nsec - start.tv_nsec)) * 1e-9;

 

    cout << "Time taken by program is : " << fixed << time_taken << setprecision(9);

    cout << " sec" << endl;

Best whishes,

The Authors