Cloud-Assisted Privacy Protection Energy Trading Based on IBS and Homomorphic Encryption in IIoT

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

As for the research itself, the work seems solid. The authors propose a privacy protection scheme for IIoT energy trading based on IBS and homomorphic encryption. However, there are some comments that must be considered:

1.    The abbreviation IBS must be stated first, before mentioning it in the abstract

2.   It would be desired to add more literature review section in to order provide a critical opinion over the current limitations of this topic and the contributions, it is not clarified enough with the current references addressed along the paper.

3.    It would be more convenient to mention the related work that related to efficient energy with IIOT:

Guan, Z., Lu, X., Wang, N., Wu, J., Du, X. and Guizani, M., 2020. Towards secure and efficient energy trading in IIoT-enabled energy internet: A blockchain approach. Future Generation Computer Systems, 110, pp.686-695.

Kim, M., Lee, J., Oh, J., Park, K., Park, Y. and Park, K., 2022. Blockchain based energy trading scheme for vehicle-to-vehicle using decentralized identifiers. Applied Energy, 322, p.119445.

Li, M., Hu, D., Lal, C., Conti, M. and Zhang, Z., 2020. Blockchain-enabled secure energy trading with verifiable fairness in industrial Internet of Things. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 16(10), pp.6564-6574.

 

4.   It would be better if the authors conduct in the experimental results a comparison with most recent related work (not only 2020), as this field has a continuous development in order to prove their superiority.

5.    More results are needed on the total calculation cost compared to others 

6.   Conclusions should be improved by adding the main contributions in a more concrete and quantitative way, limitations, managerial implications.

7.    Some grammatical errors in the paper .. Please keep the paper language consistent even British or American.

8. A 15% plagiarism is detected, as some of the paper is submitted as a student paper to university of Honk Kong.

 

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 1 Comments

 

Point 1: The abbreviation IBS must be stated first, before mentioning it in the abstract

 

Response 1: Thank you very much for your reminder. We apologize for our negligence in our previous work. We have now revised and standardized the IBS and its abbreviations in the abstract.

 

Point 2: It would be desired to add more literature review section in to order provide a critical opinion over the current limitations of this topic and the contributions, it is not clarified enough with the current references addressed along the paper.

 

Response 2: Thank you for this comment. We have made a lot of additions to the existing work in Section 1 and Section 2 in strict accordance with your requirements, and have discussed the limitations and contributions of the current theme. The following references have been added: [1], [2], [4-8], [10], [16], [24], [25], [29], [30].

 

Point 3: It would be more convenient to mention the related work that related to efficient energy with IIOT:

         Guan, Z., Lu, X., Wang, N., Wu, J., Du, X. and Guizani, M., 2020. Towards secure and efficient energy trading in IIoT-enabled energy internet: A blockchain approach. Future Generation Computer Systems, 110, pp.686-695. Kim, M., Lee, J., Oh, J., Park, K., Park, Y. and Park, K., 2022. Blockchain based energy trading scheme for vehicle-to-vehicle using decentralized identifiers. Applied Energy, 322, p.119445. Li, M., Hu, D., Lal, C., Conti, M. and Zhang, Z., 2020. Blockchain-enabled secure energy trading with verifiable fairness in industrial Internet of Things. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 16(10), pp.6564-6574.

 

Response 3: Thank you for this suggestion. We have cited and commented on these literatures in the manuscript. In addition, we have added a large number of references to summarize the current limitations and contributions of the topics covered in this paper. The following references have been added: [1], [2], [4-8], [10], [16], [24], [25], [29], [30].

 

Point 4: It would be better if the authors conduct in the experimental results a comparison with most recent related work (not only 2020), as this field has a continuous development in order to prove their superiority.

 

Response 4: Thank you for your suggestions on the experiment. In 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6, we added comparative experiments with the newer literature. Among them, 5.4 compares this scheme with other schemes([1],[8],[10]) in terms of overall functions; 5.5 adds the comparison between the system computing cost and reference [8]; The comparison between system storage overhead and reference [8] is added in 5.6.

 

Point 5: More results are needed on the total calculation cost compared to others.

 

Response 5: This is a valuable suggestion. In 5.5, we add the comparison experiment between this scheme and [8] for the overall system computing overhead, and in 5.6, we add the comparison experiment between this scheme and [8] for the system storage overhead. The experimental results show that this scheme has advantages over [8].

 

Point 6: Conclusions should be improved by adding the main contributions in a more concrete and quantitative way, limitations, managerial implications.

 

Response 6: Thank you for your comments. We have rewritten the Conclusion in strict accordance with your requirements. We have carefully analyzed the advantages of the scheme proposed in this paper compared with other schemes, as well as the limitations of the scheme proposed in this paper, in combination with the simulation results, and looked forward to the future work.

 

Point 7: Some grammatical errors in the paper .. Please keep the paper language consistent even British or American.

 

Response 7: Thank you very much for your careful reading of the manuscript and for pointing out that there are some grammatical errors in the manuscript. We apologize for the grammatical errors in the manuscript. We have rechecked the manuscript and revised the places where there are grammatical errors.

 

Point 8: A 15% plagiarism is detected, as some of the paper is submitted as a student paper to university of Honk Kong.

 

Response 8: Thank you for your correction. We apologize for the negligence in our previous work. We rechecked the manuscript and reduced the repetition rate.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper proposes a new approach aiming to enhance the privacy aspects of one of the off-chain storage schemes that have been introduced previously (PCN). This paper claims that the new approach suits the scarce sources of IIoT environment by using IBS and Paillier homomorphic encryption. Generally, the paper addresses one of the most interesting subjects and it was well written. However, some of the comments that need to be considered are:

1- The simulation scenario used to validate the proposed approach is substantially different from the IIoT environment, for instance, the authors state in line 415 that they used AMD Ryzen 7 4800H 415

CPU and 8.00 GB memory whereas most IIoT devices is empowered with low-speed microcontrollers and small memory. It would be better if the simulation is carried out using such environments. 

2- The results do not show a numerical comparison with other schemes proposed in the open literature, hence no judgment about the merit with respect to these can be given, 

3- No discussion about the suitability of the proposed scheme for other blockchain platform or even other off-chain storage schemes are given. 

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 2 Comments

 

Point 1: The simulation scenario used to validate the proposed approach is substantially different from the IIoT environment, for instance, the authors state in line 415 that they used AMD Ryzen 7 4800H CPU and 8.00 GB memory whereas most IIoT devices is empowered with low-speed microcontrollers and small memory. It would be better if the simulation is carried out using such environments.  

 

Response 1: Thank you very much for your professional advice. In order to be closer to the real industrial Internet of things environment, we have built a virtual environment using VMware Workstation 15 pro in combination with your suggestions. We conducted the experiment again and updated the experimental data.

 

Point 2: The results do not show a numerical comparison with other schemes proposed in the open literature, hence no judgment about the merit with respect to these can be given.

 

Response 2: Thank you for this comment. In 5.5, we compared the scheme proposed in this paper with [8] for the overall system computing overhead, and in 5.6, we compared the scheme proposed in this paper with [8] for the system storage overhead. The simulation results prove the superiority of the scheme proposed in this paper.

 

Point 3: No discussion about the suitability of the proposed scheme for other blockchain platform or even other off-chain storage schemes are given.

 

Response 3: We think this suggestion is very meaningful. In strict accordance with your requirements, we supplemented the discussion on the applicability of the scheme proposed in this paper in Section 6 and described the research work to be carried out in the future.

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Suggestions:

The research experimentally show the feasibility of IBS Technology. The proposed work should measure the performance of IBS in terms of overhead, latency and throughput.

For Scalability, Performance must be evaluated - Communication Overhead, Computation Overhead and Storage Overhead.

Recent references may be cited. Sustainable Smart Industry: A Secure and Energy Efficient Consensus Mechanism for Artificial Intelligence Enabled Industrial Internet of Things and  Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption: Ring Learning with Error Algorithm for Faster Encryption of IoT Sensor Signal-Based Edge Devices.

Table may be included to show the performance measurement of encryption, decryption and HomMAC costs.  

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 3 Comments

 

Point 1: The research experimentally show the feasibility of IBS Technology. The proposed work should measure the performance of IBS in terms of overhead, latency and throughput.

 

Response 1: Thank you very much for your advice. We tested the calculated cost of IBS and compared it with [8] based on the total system calculated cost. The test results show the feasibility and applicability of IBS in this scheme. Due to the limitation of time cost and experimental conditions, we will further test the delay and throughput in future research work. We describe this in Section 6 and describe future research work.

 

Point 2: For Scalability, Performance must be evaluated - Communication Overhead, Computation Overhead and Storage Overhead.

 

Response 2: This is a very meaningful suggestion. In strict accordance with your requirements, we evaluated the computing cost of each entity and the overall computing cost of the system in 5.5, and compared them with [8]; In 5.6, we added detailed analysis of the communication cost of each entity of the system and added the overall storage cost of the system. In terms of storage overhead, we also compared the scheme proposed in this paper with [8].

 

Point 3: Recent references may be cited. Sustainable Smart Industry: A Secure and Energy Efficient Consensus Mechanism for Artificial Intelligence Enabled Industrial Internet of Things and  Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption: Ring Learning with Error Algorithm for Faster Encryption of IoT Sensor Signal-Based Edge Devices.

 

Response 3: Thank you for your suggestions. In Section 2, we quote and comment on these literatures to support our research([24],[25]).

 

Point 4: Table may be included to show the performance measurement of encryption, decryption and HomMAC costs.

 

Response 4: Thank you for this comment. According to your requirements, we updated tables(Table 3, Table 4, Table 5 and Table 6) and figures(Figure 7, Figure 8, Figure 9 and Figure 10) to present our experimental results in Section 5. In addition, we also add a comparison with the existing scheme, so that the experimental results can more accurately reflect the advantages of this scheme.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have responded appropriately to all comments.

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors have addressed all my comments and all my concerns have been solved. I think the paper may be accepted. The paper has been greatly improved and the current version is suitable for publication