The Shortest Verification Path of the MHT Scheme for Verifying Distributed Data

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)

The paper has been significantly improved, the English in particular has been fixed in the entire work. 

 

The theoretical framework seems sound. There is still one relevant issue with this paper considering that it has been submitted to an applied science journal: the authors do not provide concrete example of IoT devices to prove that a time-memory tradeoff is suitable (in particular that IoT devices can cope with the memory requirements for the proposed scheme). As I have outlined in my previous review, a practical case study is still missing. The authors are recommended to include one such case studies based on specifications of real-world devices.

 

Also, the related work section has been improved but it still feels kind of short.

Author Response

We changed our paper according to your opinion.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

I have following suggestions to improve its overall quality.

1.      The abstract and conclusion should be improved to present the core contributions of the work and highlight the case study taken into account.

2.      The format of the paper needs careful adjustment, and the current paragraph structure is very unclear.

3.      Section I the authors mention that they have highlighted the existing approaches similar to their work. However, the section also draws attention on the preliminary details about the some early work and lack of recent research. So, please mention the same at the beginning of the Section to give a clear idea to the readers. Quote the some of these recent article, such as,

- Secure Data Sharing Framework via Hierarchical Greedy Embedding in Darknets. Mob. Networks Appl. 26(2): 940-948 (2021)

- Security of Mobile Multimedia Data: The Adversarial Examples for Spatio-temporal Data. Comput. Networks 181: 107432 (2020)

4.      The time complexity and space complexity of the algorithm should be given.

5.      The experimental results are too thin and need to be supplemented

6.      In addition, is it still applicable in large-scale cases?

 

Author Response

We changed our paper according to your opinion.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)

In this paper, the authors proposed solutions to improve the computational overhead and service latency caused due to the MHT’s iterated hash computation process. However, this paper has some major issues such as 

(1) quality of presentation, and (2) inadequate results and analysis. 

In Introduction section, authors need to explain in detail about the MHT and shortest verification node path. which is currently missing?

"..generate considerable amounts of data". What does considerable amounts of data mean?

multiple access edge computing architecture (MEC)- multi-access edge computing

"The NDN solves this problem using the MHT (Merkle hash tree) [9]. Various services, such as NDN and Bitcoin, utilize MHT to verify the set of segments [10][11]"

It is hard to decipher and includes several grammar mistakes.

"different, the calculation ability"?

"value [14]. Such an iterated digital signature verification also causes serious 

inefficiencies." such as?

[proposal 1] and [proposal 2] are the operation times of Table 1 and Table 2, respectively--> It is hard to decipher.

The related work doesn’t cover the literature and state-of-the-art of the presented work appropriately. 

Therefore, I strongly recommend that the authors conduct more literature review, and add more latest related works.   

Algorithm 1 and 2 are incomplete. "IF it is not valid"

Else is missing. what happens if it valid

"IF the two values are equal THEN Return valid ;"

Else is missing. what happens if two values are not equal

 

I suggest a detailed analysis and description of results are required to support their claim (MHT’s inefficiency). 

The English of this paper should be polished and revised carefully, from the reviewer's point of view,

TEHN Return invalid--> Then

Author Response

We changed our paper according to your opinion.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)

The authors responded to my questions, I don't have any other inquiries.

Author Response

Thanks a lot.

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

The author did not understand the comments carefully and revised the paper according to the comments of the reviewer.

The comparison experiment is not sufficient to verify the effect in the real environment.

 

 

 

Author Response

Thanks for your comments.

We changed our paper according to your comments as follows:

• We added two recent references you recommended.
• We added one evaluation result to describe the performance of our proposal.
• When we previously re-submitted our paper, we did not change the logic of our algorithm. Considering your comments, we have rewritten our algorithm more clearly to improve its readability. Hence, the result of our proposal is the same.

We wrote the changed parts in red text.

Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)

The related work still doesn’t cover the literature and state-of-the-art of the presented work appropriately. Therefore, I strongly recommend that the authors conduct more literature reviews, and add more latest related works. 

As the algorithm is updated. I suggest Authors need to reconduct the experiments to support their claims.

Detailed analysis of results is still missing. 

  

Author Response

Thanks for your comments.

We changed our paper according to your comments as follows:

• We added two recent references you recommended.
• We added one evaluation result to describe the performance of our proposal.
• When we previously re-submitted our paper, we did not change the logic of our algorithm. Considering your comments, we have rewritten our algorithm more clearly to improve its readability. Hence, the result of our proposal is the same.

We wrote the changed parts in red text.

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

All of my questions and concerns have been addressed in the revised version.

 

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors presented the manuscript entitles Low-cost MHT Scheme for Verifying Distributed Data. The proposed work analyzes the degree of repeated process of the MHT and proposes an improved MHT scheme. The authors have achieved the reasonable performance. The article needs to modify very carefully, as I didn’t see any novelty in the manuscript. The main problems in the manuscript are highlighted as under.

(1) English writing of the manuscript is not up-to-date. The authors should proof read the article from the native speaker.

(2) In the abstract, the authors only emphasize on the problem. However, the main work done in the manuscript is only explained just in 2 to 3 lines. It is suggested that the authors should re-write the abstract again and highlight the step by step method applied in the manuscript and achieved results.

(3) The novelty of the paper is not explained. The authors are suggested to write the main contributions in the bullets.

(4) The quality of figures must be improved.

(5) Conclusion of the work is not clearly explained. What would be the future directions of the proposed study?

(6) The article has very less number of references. The authors must do the extensive literature review related to topic and explain the advantages of the presented work in comparison to the latest literature.

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thanks for your comments.
Based on your advice, we have revised our paper. We re-edited our paper using AJE service. Also, we change the title of our paper to make the contribution of our paper clear. The detailed revisions are attached. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The work proposes a time-memory tradeoff to improve the computational costs of Merkle Hash Trees (MHT) for retrieving authenticated information over NDN (Named-Data Networking). There are several major problems with the work:

1. The contribution of the work is minimal. What the authors propose is that the nodes of a MHT are stored to avoid re-computation. This time-memory tradeoff, caching, is a rather obvious solution. The problem is that many devices, especially in the IoT suffer from memory shortages, while the computation cost, consider de depth of 16-32 levels of a Merkle tree would require only some dozen hash computations or so. Even if needed, storing the nodes of the MHT is too small for a scientific contribution.

2. Continuing the above argument, the authors provide no practical scenario to justify the need for the improvement they suggest. Figure 2, 5 and 6 try to justify the approach by some synthetic calculus but there is no specific practical scenario to be linked with this analysis. By specific, I mean a concrete application like Bitcoin or some concrete IoT network.

3. The results from the aforementioned figures, the practical results from the work, are missing the exact parameters for the underlying infrastructure. There is no mention of the devices on which these computations were performed. 

4. The formalism employed by the work is also wrong, for example the authors are using an recursive notation “memory ?[?]” which is highly misleading

5. The related works are very few, suggesting that either this problem is not of much interest or that a large number of works have been neglected. This section needs to be improved to make the work convincing.

6. The English is highly problematic, there are far too many mistakes: 

- “install network facilities more” – missing period after “facilities”

- “generate digital signatures as the number of the fragments of the data.” – “as the” must be replaced with “proportionally with”

- “ the number of these repeats also increases” – number of such repetitions

- “check who a publisher generated the received segment is” – check who is the publisher of a …

- “has not been unchanged” – double negation likely wrong in this context

7. Minor issues:

- page 5, line 195, please expand the AR/VR acronym 

- caption of Figure 6 is in bold.

 

Finally, the work does not seem mature enough for publication. 

 

Author Response

Thanks for your comments.
Based on your advice, we have revised our paper. We re-edited our paper using AJE service. Also, we change the title of our paper to make the contribution of our paper clear. The detailed revisions are attached. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx