File System Support for Privacy-Preserving Analysis and Forensics in Low-Bandwidth Edge Environments

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In this paper, a file system support for privacy-preserving analysis and forensics in low-bandwidth edge environments has been presented. It is mentioned that the idea of the manuscript can be useful to fight against overfishing. However, there are some major issues that need to be addressed as follows:

1- Considering the literature of the problem,  the authors need to clarify why they feel that the proposed approach is necessary for solving the problems associated with overfishing. It is recommended that the potential advantages of this technology are compared to its price and complexity. 

2- The configuration file, which has been shown in Listing 1, needs to be described comprehensively with a diagram. 

3- Data transmission (section 6.4) needs to be explained in detail.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,
Thank you for your valuable feedback regarding our manuscript submission. We have taken your points to heart and have worked to meet your concerns. What follows is a response to your suggestions with a description of the steps we have taken to improve our manuscript. 

1- Considering the literature of the problem,  the authors need to clarify why they feel that the proposed approach is necessary for solving the problems associated with overfishing. It is recommended that the potential advantages of this technology are compared to its price and complexity. 

It has become clear to us that our Introduction section failed to provide relevant background work, and was not concise enough in outlining our contributions and the proposed advantages of our approach. To correct this, we have re-written parts of the Introduction section of our manuscript, to include additional references to related background work, and a more concise summary of our specific contributions. Furthermore, we have clarified what we conjecture is the advantage of our approach compared to the alternative systems and juridical proposals that are referenced in this section.

2- The configuration file, which has been shown in Listing 1, needs to be described comprehensively with a diagram. 

It has become apparent to us that our listings, particularly the configuration file overview (Listing 1), was not adequate to describe the functionality and purpose of this file. We have decided to remove Listing 1 and 2, and instead incorporate them into a new figure (Figure 3) that more clearly illustrates the configuration file's functionality, and the purpose of its content. The intentions behind adding this new figure is to provide a better overview of the correlation between the file system and the two types of files previously illustrated in listings. 

3- Data transmission (section 6.4) needs to be explained in detail.

The Data Transmission section has been partly rewritten. The goal of this modification is to better provide a relation between the background work presented in this section, and the work presented in the rest of the article. We believe this section previously did not adequately present how this background work was related to our approach, and it has been modified to improve clarity and relevance.

Overall, we have revised our manuscript to improve clarity, language, and to show the relevance between our work, our application domain, and the presented background work. In addition to the changes outlined above, the Conclusion section has been re-written to concisely summarize the goal of our approach in contrast to alternative solutions, and to provide a conclusion that adequately corresponds to our results. Our previous Conclusion section lacked a relevant description of our implementation and findings, and our revision aims to correct this issue.

We hope you find this revised version of the manuscript to have addressed some of the concerns with the initial submission.

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper proposes a distributed edge system in the domain of sustainable harvesting of resources in the Arctic Ocean. The paper can be improved in the following ways:

1- Introduction should be improved to have more recent research results from similar studies. Also, it should have a sub-section that discusses the major contribution of the paper.

2- More factors to study and show their effects as part of the results section would improve the authenticity and the quality of the study.

3- It would be interesting to see more security analysis of some security and privacy aspects of the proposed scheme. In particular, disucssion on how does the proposed scheme preserve privacy.

4- Minor editing and revision is necessary.

1.  

Author Response

Dear reviewer,
Thank you for your valuable feedback regarding our manuscript submission. We have taken your points to heart and have worked to meet your concerns. What follows is a response to your suggestions with a description of the steps we have taken to improve our manuscript. 

1- Introduction should be improved to have more recent research results from similar studies. Also, it should have a sub-section that discusses the major contribution of the paper.

It has become clear to us that our Introduction section failed to provide relevant background work, and was not concise enough in outlining our contributions and the proposed advantages of our approach. To correct this, we have re-written parts of the Introduction section of our manuscript, to include additional references to related background work, and a more concise summary of our specific contributions. Furthermore, we have clarified what we conjecture is the advantage of our approach compared to the alternative systems and juridical proposals that are referenced in this section.

2- More factors to study and show their effects as part of the results section would improve the authenticity and the quality of the study.

We agree that more factors to study would provide for interesting results and discussion, but we have not been able to provide additional results for this revision. However, we have aimed to improve the description of our current results and implementation in correlation with our application domain, as described below.

3- It would be interesting to see more security analysis of some security and privacy aspects of the proposed scheme. In particular, discussion on how does the proposed scheme preserve privacy.

In discussing our proposed scheme, we have aimed to improve our manuscript with a better description of how our approach aims to provide privacy in our Introduction section, and a more concise description of how the system can be utilized to provide access control in the Implementation section. A new figure has been added to the Implementation section (Figure 3) as a more informative replacement of the previous listings. Additionally, the Conclusion section has been extended to better show our results, and how they correlate with the goals of our approach and implementation. The intention of these changes is to more clearly and accurately describe our approach, and how it relates to our application domain and our goals of providing a privacy preserving system. 

4- Minor editing and revision is necessary.

Overall, we have worked to improve the language and clarity of our manuscript. To meet your feedback on language and editing, we have cleared inconsistencies and worked to improve the grammar and style of our text. In addition to the changes outlined above, we have made grammar and style changes throughout the sections of the manuscript, with the most significant revisions being applied in sections 3.1 and 6.4.

We hope you find this revised version of the manuscript to have addressed some of your concerns with the initial submission.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

All comments have been addressed 

Reviewer 2 Report

The introduction is still needs some improvement, but it should be fine.