Generalized Code-Abiding Countermeasure

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

This article proposes a secure-efficient countermeasure solution based on parity bit code that is tested on the LED lightweight cipher
to measure its overhead.
Furthermore, the following points regarding motivation and argumentation should be considered in the revision of this article:
- at this moment, the overall feeling of the Abstract is mechanical and should be written in a smoother way. On this behalf, try to use
 some connecting words in between sentences/phrases to make the story line flow. This will help better preparing and presenting the aim of
this article.
- the end of the first paragraph on the Introduction section is a bit vague. Hence, I suggest to rephrase the last phrase.  
- the use of 'his' could be replaced with 'the countermeasures considered' before the start of the 1.1. sub-section.
- rename sub-section 1.2. from 'Our contributions' to just 'Contributions'.
- I suggest you to do some grammar and typos checks, e.g., 'Code abiding was introduce' -> should be 'was introduced', 'ans some requirements' etc.
- given the method proposed and the fact that security attacks imply a broader range of vulnerablities and affected aspecs of systems,
the generability should be reduced concerning security - as discussed now before the start of sub-section 4.1.
- the results presented are impressive on all three scenarios and denote the robustness of the solution proposed. Is there a scenario that
you could hypothetically think of that this would not provide 100% accuracy?

Author Response

Firstly, I would like to thank you for reading and reviewing this paper.

We modified the abstract and the intro to make it clearer and easier to read. We also checked the typos and corrected them.

For the 100% fault coverage, in the fault models chosen (any single fault injected in any word of the bitsliced state), the information redundancy will always detect the injection. However, we could imagine other fault models such as multiple fault injections or instruction skips that would lead to undetected faults. These faults require a totally different injection setup (multi spots laser, clock glitching on a very precise instruction), then the fault is much more difficult to inject. Thus, theoretically, the parity bit scheme is not foolproof, but in our scope of injections, the countermeasure is designed to ensure 100% fault coverage.

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors discussed the methodology that is related to preventing fault injection using error detection code. The manuscript is well-structured, but the following issues should be addressed.

- The abstract has to be well-structured and clear, including what are the challenges in the background domain, how to solve them and what is the advantage of the proposed work.

- It would be better if more keywords are added because there are some keywords that are related to your proposal.

- More references/works are needed to add to this manuscript; thus, these can significantly express the research gaps.

Author Response

First, I would like to thank you for your time reading and reviewing the article.

We modified the abstract to make it clearer in the context of the paper.

We hope these modifications will match your expectations.

Reviewer 3 Report

In this paper, authors have made an effort to propose a secure-efficient countermeasure for a lightweight cipher. They have considered information redundancy based on parity bit code, with 4 code-abiding transformations of the operations. The proposed method is validated with the examples. The contribution of the authors is significant. The paper is well-written.  However, authors need to check some grammatically errors throughout the paper.  

Author Response

First I would like to thank you for your time used to read and review our paper.

We checked the gramatically errors and hope that none will be found during the following process.