Crypto Hash Algorithm-Based Blockchain Technology for Managing Decentralized Ledger Database in Oil and Gas Industry

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

in this paper, authors implemented blockchain technology in the Oil and Gas Industry, in order to improve supply chain problem, as an implementation paper is quite good organized and well defined, however, I would like to add some comments in order to improve quality of the paper. 1: in my idea, it is much better if you provided a direct contribution of this research in the introduction section, as a help for you, you can check the following paper read introduction section. "Toward a blockchain cloud manufacturing system as a peer to peer distributed network platform " 2: I suggest to authors to cite a related academic paper, with high-quality journal 3: improve Fig 4, you used UML diagram but you didn't follow the rule. 4: which type of blockchain and platform you used for implementation, please mention in the paper.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We are humbly appreciate you for your valuable time taken and contributions making to better our research article and to meet up with world class contribution.

All the issues raised step by step has been duly treated and corrected as contained in the attachment here, also details implementation are contained in the revised article.

Once again, we appreciate you for your knowledge shairing and immense contribution.

Thank you.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper proposed the method for securing and monitoring the product distribution records in a decentralized ledger database using blockchain. The idea is festinating. However, I had the following concerns:

 

·       The main contributions and the flow of the paper are not clear. It appears the authors proposed a new hash algorithm but they seem just applied the current technology. If the authors applied the blockchain to the oil and gas industry, then the authors need to clarify this and describe the system design more clearly.  Typically, when paper describes the system design, they should provide an architecture first, explain design goal and main flow and then describe each component. The key technology using need to come after. The authors need to reorganize the paper to follow the flow.

·       Some of the details were missing. What kind of blockchain did the authors use? E.g. a public chain or private chain? If the authors used permission blockchain, they need to detail the permission rules.

·       For the system design, how the public and private key were managed? Once the record is hashed in the blockchain, how the users queried the content of the record?

·       The manuscript stated that "This system proof to be efficient, secured and easy" in the abstract. However, the study lacked sufficient evaluation. Did the communication with blockchain affect the transmission speed? The paper also lacked any attack evaluation and did not provide much evidence to prove the system is secured.

·       Minor:

·       If the study applied some current technology e.g. SHA-1 (not proposed or improved), the authors may only need to provide the content as short as possible.

·       Figure 4. and Figure 9 is not clear. Please provide the picture with high-resolution.

·       Figure 5 is very typical and common user authentication process. The purpose of this figure is not clear.

·       Considering moving Figure 9 to the supplementary.  Such figures are not clear and not needed in the main text.

·       Keep all the implementation details (MySQL, Javascript, PHP) in a single paragraph.

·       Define the short name when it is first used.

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

We are humbly appreciate you for your valuable time taken and contributions making to better our research article and to meet up with world class standard.

All the issues raised step by step has been duly treated and corrected as contained in the attachment here, also details implementation are contained in the revised article.

Once again, we appreciate you for your knowledge shairing and immense contribution.

Thank you.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The presented problem is a serious problem in oil countries. Recorded frauds in the last decade have occurred in different countries in Africa and Asia. Using Blockchain to prevent this kind of frauds is a trending research direction. However, this research has some limitations (or confusions).The proposed approach didn't exploit the whole advantage of Blockchain which makes this approach is closer to distributed database (or even cloud systems) than to Blockchain. The paper didn't show/mention the used consensus/mining algorithm (if any) between the involved nodes. How would the approach achieve the distributed immutability without a consensus algorithm? 

The authors mentioned using remote monitoring systems (sensors) to record data about the transmitted fuel between different points in the oil supply chain. Do you assume that the monitoring sensors are secured? 

I would suggest to expand your research to include protecting the quality of the fuel by recording the information collected via the molecular markers (fuel-marker programs) in the distributed ledger as well.

Some figures are not in high quality such as the first one. It was hard to read the font.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

We are humbly appreciate you for your valuable time taken and contributions making to better our research article and to meet up with world class contribution.

All the issues raised step by step has been duly treated and corrected as contained in the attachment here, also details implementation are contained in the revised article. Those sections that required improvement has been duly done.

Once again, we appreciate you for your knowledge shairing and immense contribution.

Thank you.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

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The author has addressed most of the concerns. Only some minor changes such as:

"Especially, in banking industry, national population data 76 management, election voting system management and e-business transaction."

This is not a full sentence. Some words in Figure 2 (a) are not fully present. 

The number of Conclusion section should be 5.

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you for addressing my concerns/questions. I realize there is not enough research in this area of oil and gas supply chain using Blockchain and I hope this paper helps to open this avenue for more researchers.