A Systematic Review on Social Robots in Public Spaces: Threat Landscape and Attack Surface

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper presents a systematically review on social robots in public spaces. It is well structured, written in clear language, and has a considerable number of references, making it a good base for researchers in the field.

Although well written and explicit, there are some points that could be improved, namely:

-Align all figures and tables with the template. Figures and tables are out of the margins;

-The graphics in Figure 4 are empty, they do not have any information displayed

Author Response

Please, see the document

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I have read the manuscript with great interest and provide some opportunities to improve it. I would like to encourage the authors to reflect these comments and submit revised version of the article.

 

Abstract: I would suggest extending a “Conclusion” section there a bit to give a reader a hint what are the takeaways from the paper.

 

Keywords - SLR – is it common praxis to put an abbreviation as a keyword? Also, it is clear from the title that it is a literature review.

 

Introduction: “and during pandemic like 33 Covid-19 [26,27].” … I would rephrase “, during pandemic like 33 Covid-19 [26,27] or in other possible cases.” … the list is very probably not exhaustive.

 

I like the Introduction section, it gives a good situational overview. One suggestion: you are definitely right at the point that security and safety of social robots are priority, especially when they are connected to Internet, making them Internet of Things (IoT) systems practically. Connectivity to a public data network increases an attack surface of a robot, as it does with IoT systems in general. It would be helpful to add this general context to the introduction. Some literature to support the discussion:

 

Mahmoud, R., Yousuf, T., Aloul, F., & Zualkernan, I. (2015, December). Internet of things (IoT) security: Current status, challenges and prospective measures. In 2015 10th International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions (ICITST) (pp. 336-341). IEEE.

 

Bures M., Klima M., Rechtberger V., Ahmed B.S., Hindy H., Bellekens X. (2021) Review of Specific Features and Challenges in the Current Internet of Things Systems Impacting Their Security and Reliability. In: Trends and Applications in Information Systems and Technologies. WorldCIST 2021. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1367. pp 546-556. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-72660-7_52

 

“2.1. Key concepts and definitions” it reads better in the text when a section heading is not followed immediately by a subheading; add some introductory text between them.

 

Table A1 – I like this list, but is it really exhaustive?  I would rephrase to “List of typical” or “List of the most common” or “list of sensors in the robots examined in this review”

 

I would suggest ending the related work section by a summary what is missing in the literature and as a result your motivation to write this review. Just a quick summary.

 

Schema in Fig 1 is nice, however, especially in Stage 3, I would connect the individual activities by arrows how they were proceeded in a timeline (an arrow from left to the right, typically).

 

RQs are good, maybe rename “Rationale” to “Contribution” ?

 

Search strategy – have you used some testing set of papers to verify the queries?

 

Page 13 “Table 2Error! Reference source not found..”  a typo there, page 17 “2Error! Reference source not found.” the same, page 24 as well

 

Fig 2 – deserves better formatting

 

Actually the word cloud in Fig 3 is a nice one, but I’m hesitating if to recommend to keep it in a research study… it’s not really an exact presentation of findings

 

Figure 4. – obviously some error, no data in the graphs

 

A conceptual issue – it’s rather unusual to analyze numbers of citations per the examined studies. What is an added value of it? Moreover, it changes over time… I don’t say it doesn’t make sense; maybe just explain why you analyze these data.

 

There is lot of useful findings in the paper, I have some remarks to Figures 6 and 8. Figure 6:  Wars are not natural disasters. Supply chain options seem rather as just a list of components, not some threats. Also, it seems there is significant overlap between External and Public space.  Please consider revising this taxonomy.

 

Figure 8. gives good overview, but it needs more elaborating. Some of the parts are just keywords that deserve more explanation. Intuitively I am getting the point what you might try to say, but more detailed description would be needed. Also please review Fig.6 and 7 if this is not also the case.

 

Overall, I like the paper. I hope my suggestions will be useful to improve it further.

Author Response

Please, see document

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I think authors have sufficiently reflected on my comments and the clarity of the manuscript has been improved. I would suggest accepting the paper.