FAIDM for Medical Privacy Protection in 5G Telemedicine Systems
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The proposal introduces a novel scheme for Privacy protection on 5G environments that brings federated identity management in a hierarchical structure, Identity authentication by mutual authentication between constrain nodes and gateway nodes, and anonymous identities to reduce the possibility of leaking transmitted medical data. The submission addresses a trending research fields that aims on resolving the existing gaps towards the adoption of IoT/5G enablers on the health sector due to constrains related with the management of sensitive information. The paper is well presented, with satisfying scientifically-soundness. However, and despite the interest it may rise on the audience, it is strongly recommended to give visibility to its core differentiating aspects against the existing/ongoing research work. This may be achieved by among others, answering the following questions:
- There are several ambitious research actions that explore the synergy between telemedicine and 5G, together with the security and privacy constrains they entail (e.g. H2020-SLICENET, H2020-5GZORRO, H2020-PALANTIR, etc); which has led to numerous related publications. Since the paper addresses a trending but also widely under research topic, this reviewer suggests to be more accurate in the description of its core contributions to the state of the art (i.e. the proposal differentiating aspects). For example, they may be clearly enumerated at the introduction.
- A description of the organization of the document (forthcoming sections and their contents) shall be provided as a last paragraph of the Introduction.
- How the proposed scheme may complement or be complemented by the related applications on network slicing and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT)?
- The effectiveness of the proposals among others rely on trusted centres (in this case linked to health institutions), so we can assume a fixed root-of-trust. What may be de impact of relaying on a distributed root-of-trust, for example, if it is needed to deploy auxiliary HSMs or their software version (e.g. as VNFs) closer to the edge due to an emergency like crisis or natural disaster?
- How the proposed scheme may react against side-channel attacks?
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This paper addresses an interesting and very important topic. No one can dispute the benefits of 5G networks. The main concern is the applicability of the proposal in the real-world. There are very limited areas with 5G connectivity.
There are 3 main contributions of the paper:
(i) Proposed scheme provides federated identity management which can manage identity of devices in a hierarchical structure.
(ii) Identity authentication will be achieved by mutual authentication between constrain nodes and gateway nodes.
(iii) Proposed scheme provides anonymous identities to reduce the possibility of leaking transmitted medical data.
The results don't evaluate the proposal in details and need more in-depth evaluation and the discussion. Section 5, performance evaluation, is very brief and doesn't provide a detailed evaluation. Is this submission a work in progress?
Author Response
We revised performance analysis by separating this section into “Security Requirements Comparison” and “Computational Complexity Comparison,” and we also gave a figure 8 to show the results of evaluations between compared works.
Reviewer 3 Report
This is an interesting paper, but I have two main questions which will affect my decision toward acceptance of this paper:
1) While the paper focuses about 5G, I cannot see any specific functionality of 5G has been used in your work, which you cannot find in another type of network (e.g. LTE).
2) Seems that the main idea of the proposed security protocol in this paper is based on Certificate Authority mechanism in Public Key Cryptography scheme. I want to see a comparison on what is the exactly novelty and how it fit into the medical application specifically. Is it true to say that the main contribution here is to propose using Chebyshev chaotic maps rather than ECC.
3) The performance analysis is quite simplistic and needs more in-depth discussion.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The revised submission is improved as compared to the first version. Authors largely addressed the comments from previous version.
However, this proposal requires more in-depth analysis of the proposal. I recommend adding more results before accepting
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Authors had addressed my concerns and there is no more comments.
Author Response
Thank you for your concerns and encouragements. We polished this manuscript in revised manuscript. All changes are shown in "Changed Highlight_R2."
