A Blockchain-Based Authentication Solution for 6G Communication Security in Tactile Networks

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Below comments should be properly considered

Section 4, supposed to be the core part of the research, is an unclear and very short description of the proposed work and an unclear demonstration of figures 10, 11 and 12•

No description for the experiments and how they have been implemented and performed, no demonstration about how the results have been collected and the related figures, and most important no discussion at all about results

Author Response

Thank you for your comments, it has helped us improve the manuscript.

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript entitled “Blockchain-based Authentication Solution for 6G Communication Security in Tactile Networks”, proposed a new scheme of hysteresis digital signature that provides anonymization to authenticate and secure the blockchain without cryptography for the 6G authentication process to secure the network.

This is a revised manuscript, and the author carefully modified the whole manuscript. I would recommend accepting this paper.

Author Response

Thank you for your comments, it has helped us improve the manuscript.

Reviewer 3 Report

The writing skills for this papers are quite poor. The paper needs a thorough proofreading and most of the sentences need to be rephrased. The motivation for this paper and the contribution are not well explained. The literature provide a number of articles that focused on the verification of academic documents. How the authors need to answer the following concerns.

Author Response

Thank you for your comments, it has helped us improve the manuscript.

Reviewer 4 Report

In this paper, a new type of authentication method,using blockchain, is presented in order to overcome the disadvantages of the 4G and 5G networks. The Blockchain data has the advantage that while it is decentralized and not enforceable it assures integrity and availability, due to its distributed ledger and tamper-proof nature, making it more secure. The article lays out both the advantages and disadvantages of using this technology, but makes a strong argument as to why blockchain should be used in further applications. The paper focuses primarily on the behavior of authentication for communication, proposing the use of the Hysteresis Digital Signature over Merkel's tree.

The article has a well devised structure, being composed of seven sections, each containing several sub-sections which describe the main ideas in more detail.

Some of the issues and technologies discussed may not be fully understood by the general public, but the article does an excellent job in explaining all these concepts and technologies through the use of simple, understandable terms and diagrams that complement the ideas discussed in it.

The references that were used offer sufficient credibility, being up to date with the topics presented in the article.

There are minor grammar mistakes such as:

-line 18: missing a determiner before the word “bulk”;

-line 78: the incorrect use of the verb “highlight” in future tense;

-line 78: missing the comma before “which”;

-line 159: the incorrect use of the verb “enhancing”, instead of “enhanced”.

The references should include more details about network applications, for example:

- Patachia-Sultanoiu, Cristian, et al. "Advanced 5G Architectures for Future NetApps and Verticals." 2021 IEEE International Black Sea Conference on Communications and Networking (BlackSeaCom). IEEE, 2021.

- Trichias, Konstantinos, et al. "VITAL-5G: Innovative Network Applications (NetApps) Support over 5G Connectivity for the Transport & Logistics Vertical." 2021 Joint European Conference on Networks and Communications & 6G Summit (EuCNC/6G Summit). IEEE, 2021.

- Fettweis, Gerhard Paul, and Holger Boche. "6g: The personal tactile internet-and open questions for information theory." IEEE BITS the Information Theory Magazine (2021).

Author Response

Thank you for your comments, it has helped us improve the manuscript.

Round 2

Reviewer 4 Report

All comments have been addressed

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

This paper presented a Blockchain-based Authentication Solution for 6G Communication Security in Tactile Networks. It is a interesting research in a relevant area. The presentation is satisfactory. This paper could be accepted for publication after a minor revision. The authors may give more discussions on the security issues.

The blockchain itself also has security issues. The security issues could be categorized into three levels, namely, the process level, the data level, and the infrastructure level. There exist many studies on how to incorporate different blockchain technologies to enhance the security, transparency, and traceability of systems. For instance, blockchain security: a survey of techniques and research directions; blockchain-secured smart manufacturing in industry 4.0: a survey. The authors may give more discussions on this issue.

In terms of the authenticity of digital data, the blockchain-based system could act as an anti-counterfeiting digital twin to ensure that the data have not been tampered with. The authors may give more discussions on the relationship between the digital twin and the digital data. For instance, blockchain-empowered sustainable manufacturing and product lifecycle management in industry 4.0: a survey. In the authentication aspect, the blockchain may be combined with optimization models, besides the AI models. For instance, makerchain: a blockchain with chemical signature for self-organizing process in social manufacturing; A survey on the security of blockchain systems. The authors may give more discussions on this issue.

Reviewer 2 Report

In this research, a good idea has been highlighted in the abstract section, however, it needs to be demonstrated and presented properly.

• The title of the research started with "blockchain", while it hasn't been mentioned in the introduction section what the roles of blockchain in this work and what is the aim of the whole research.
• The content of section 2 can't be considered as a literature review, as there are no related works described and compared to the current work.
• Section 3 takes most of the research text, it is a long section that covers about 50% of the paper text while the most essential sections are very short and unclear
• Section 4, supposed to be the core part of the research, is an unclear and very short description of the proposed work and an unclear demonstration of figures 10, 11, and 12.
• No description for the experiments and how they have been implemented and performed, no demonstration about how the results have been collected and the related figures, and most important no discussion at all about results
• The conclusion section does not present related conclusions to the work and findings of the research

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript entitled “Blockchain-based Authentication Solution for 6G Communication Security in Tactile Networks”, proposed a new scheme of hysteresis digital signature that provides anonymization to authenticate and secure the blockchain without cryptography for the 6G authentication process to secure the network. However, the author focused more on background information rather than the main contribution. I would recommend rewriting the whole manuscript.

1. More than 50% text in the abstract is just an introduction. Describe a little more about the contribution and result. Keep one or two sentences from here and move other text to the introduction section – “In this era, the ultimate vision is to transform current technologies into an intelligent global environment to facilitate everyday transactions. The emerging Industry 4.0 has introduced promising potentials that expedite the Internet of Things (IoT) transition into the internet of everything (IoE) utilizing the advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Such a transition implies that sensitive data can be effortlessly accessed via the open network used by various domains like military, business, transportation, medical, and education, leading to potential security concerns. Several challenges and issues of scalability, legal issues, data privacy, data security, risk management, consensus, and addressing space are highlighted in this paper with some results on how blockchain technology tackles them. Although, Blockchain with the above fields already employs a fast network like 5G, the explosive growth in the development and implementation of various Industry 4.0 related domains require significantly faster networking speed and a secure mechanism for data transfer, exhibiting the need for 6G to meet the real-time applications.”
2. The pi-chart is good for quantitative data representation. Is there any alternative way to represent Figure 2 without a pi-chart?
3. Section 3 is unnecessarily large. I would suggest most of the part and keep two to three paragraphs like section 2.
4. The contribution is not clear enough to understand the whole process. Please enhance the contribution with the necessary graph and explanation.
5. The graphics quality of some figures is poor, please enhance them.

Reviewer 4 Report

(1) The paper reviews different technical aspects of 5G and 6G network requirements and related issues, but very low amount of work has been performed on own basis.
(2) Majority of the contents from the authors is not related to the scope of the journal (the science related to the electronics)
(3) The authors does propose a blockchain model but most of it is very common in the published literature and very small amount of details have been discussed in terms of contribution from the authors as compared to the state-of-the-art or publised papers?
(4) Section 5 mentions "Experiments". what experiments have you performed? what are its details? The results show an analysis report which are too short to be considered for a research paper or reach to a conclusion.
(5) The paper requires a huge amount of work in terms of analysis to report the significance of their proposed model.
(6) The write-up is mostly in the form of a tutorial from the published literatue. As it is not a review paper, please make concise statements and ensure that most of the contents in the paper are only based on author's work and contribution.