A Novel Encryption Scheme in Ship Remote Control against Differential Fault Attack

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors present a modification to the SM4 algorithm for ship remote control against Differential fault attack. The Wasserstein GAN Gradient Penalty (WGAN-GP) is used to dynamically generate S-boxes to confuse the differential distribution table.

The differential fault is introduced in the 32nd round of encryption and analysed to demonstrate their modification. I have few queries.

1.  GAN is used for generation of S-Boxes which have to change  dynamically. However, training the GAN is itself a time consuming task.  How is this accounted in the overall encryption time.

2. How are the problems of GAN such as non-convergence and mode collapse overcome for each S-box generation by using the 2-dimensional deconvolution and convolution. Please explain

3. The differential fault is introduced in the 32nd round of encryption and analyzed. What will be the scenario if the fault occurs at an intermediatary stage. The authors may give an similar analysis.

4. The authors need to explain the significance of the parameters evaluated in Table  3.

5. What does the author wants to convey in fig. 6. Pl explain.

5. What is the meaning of the line 293, Pg 10. I think it is grammatically wrong

6. There are many such grammatical errors.  line 5-6, line 21, line 63, line 305 etc. Please check the paper for grammatical errors.

7. Instead of using Reference 7, Reference 8 etc ,  it could be mentioned as "The authors in [7]  designed....."

8. The rest of the paper , lines 69 to 81 need to rewritten as what each section deals with .

9. The titles 2.1 and 2.1.1 are same. The subsections 2.1.1 and 2.1.2 can be removed and made as a single section.

10. The implementation of the improved SM4 algorithm is based on the
premise that its intermediate values Ti and Si are not stored in the storage unit, otherwise the DFA is still threatening.

But this cannot be overcome. Any proposal to overwrite the stored info or delete it is possible. Please analyze .

 

Author Response

请参阅附件。

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Reviewer Comments

This paper proposes a novel encryption scheme in ship remote control against differential fault attacks. Furthermore, the paper aims to improve the SM4 algorithm in the phase of the S-box 4 generation and circular encryption.

The topic is relevant for cybersecurity, cyber physical systems and cryptography development research directions. Further, the manuscript highlights how sensitive information could be hidden after simulation.

I recommend the manuscript be “accepted with corrections”.

The following are to be addressed:

 

#1: Introduction.

Authors should consider discussing the CPS infrastructure of the intelligent ship and components from Cyber Physical, Cyber Digital and Human elements for a ship. (Move figure 4 here as a conceptual Model if possible)

 

Authors should discuss how these components (intelligent ship devices) integrate to provide communication for information dissemination.  

 

Consider this statement: “Under complex sea conditions, there are risks such as ship remote control delay becoming larger and ship out of control. Using symmetric encryption algorithm can ensure the security of data with less system resources, but there is a risk of DFA, which cannot meet the absolute security requirements of intelligent ship  data transmission.”

 

How does the CPS architecture establish communication between land, sea and navigation devices using intelligent sensors and actuators?

How did you determine the DFA risks and vulnerabilities on the CPS components?

Discuss these issues, and then you can discuss the cryptography algorithms you are proposing.

 

# Literature Review

Provide related works discussing the issues/ challenges of the CPS ship remote control.

Section 2.2: Discussing a few more DFA and other related cyberattacks on intelligent ship components and devices, including remote control, navigations, and its impact, will suffice.

Adding external protection and verification mechanisms and methods to resist DFA can be established with relevant and detailed discussion on the vulnerabilities of the components.

 

#3: Prevention of DFA

Authors should briefly discuss their rationale for choosing block cypher as opposed to stream cypher under complex see conditions. Comparatively

 

What are the security implications in real-time information sharing in an intelligent ship?

 

Authors should move figure 4 to section 1 to become figure 1.

 

Then in section 4.1, model a similar security conceptual figure as (figure 5) that incorporates all the vulnerable spots that are at risk of cyberattack exploits, and that require end-to-end encryption.

 4.3 Discuss the new figure 5 and some security recommendations to improve the manuscript.

 

Good paper overall.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf