Internet of Things Aware Secure Dew Computing Architecture for Distributed Hotspot Network: A Conceptual Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors discussed the opportunity to deploy a distributed architecture that brings secure hotspot coverage for IoT devices over long distances. The idea is interesting. However, I have the following concerns. 

 

 

1. Please revise the grammatical issues of the paper. 

2. Recent dew-assisted IoT paper is missing. Some are mentioned as follows. 

->"Dewdrone: Dew computing for Internet of Drone Things," in IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine, doi: 10.1109/MCE.2021.3139306.

->"FBI: A Federated Learning-Based Blockchain-Embedded Data Accumulation Scheme Using Drones for Internet of Things," in IEEE Wireless Communications Letters, vol. 11, no. 5, pp. 972-976, May 2022, doi: 10.1109/LWC.2022.3151873.

3. A scalability analysis is required for the mass IoT scenario. 

4. "Dew computing can form dewlets that supports rental facility of network coverage" -> How and who will handle the fairness in the network? 

5. who will be the miner? What's the gain for miners? 

6. Diverse connectivity is considered in the network. A discussion on the channel model is required.

7. "We modified the design of the architecture in a multi-layered manner to achieve more control over the network" -> Won't it create an extra delay in the network?

8. Won't it create a burden in the gateway by adding blockchain?

9. A threat model is required. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author Response

We are thankful to the editor and both reviewers for providing great remarks to improve the quality of the paper. We have done revisions and provided responses to the queries of the reviewers. We are hopeful that the revision can be considered for acceptance.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

In this paper, the authors present a novel idea for an IoT-based secure distributed hotspot network to solve the existing problems in creating and deploying a hotspot network that has the potential to succeed as a business model. The scalability can  

be increased by including many Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices with sensors and Wi-Fi and/or Lo-raWAN connectivity modules. The hotspot owners can rent out their hotspots to create a distributed hotspot network in which the hotspots can act as an ordinary data gateway, a full-fledged hotspot miner, and a lightweight hotspot miner to earn crypto tokens as rewards for certain activities. The advantages of Wi-Fi and LoraWAN can be seamlessly leveraged to achieve optimal  coverage, higher network security, and suitable data transmission rate for transferring sensor data  from IoT devices to remote application servers and users.

 

1. As shown in "Figure 1. Generic structure of Wi-Fi hotspots", there are a number of entities involved. Is there some form of (user) authentication needed? As wireless applications are often security-critical, are the following multi-factor authentication schemes suitable? It would be better for the authors to discuss this. 

"Quantum-Safe Round-Optimal Password Authentication for Mobile Devices", IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2020

“Strong Authentication without Temper-Resistant Hardware and Application to Federated Identities” In Proc. NDSS. 2020.

 

2. I suggest the authors to explicitly define the threat model, that is what are the capabilities allowed to an attacker. Otherwise it is difficult to assess the security of the proposed protocol.

“Two birds with one stone: Two-factor authentication with security beyond conventional bound.” IEEE transactions on dependable and secure computing, 2018,15(4):708-722.

 

3. It is increasingly popular for attackers to exploit IoT devices as botnet  to conduct DDoS attacks. Generally, attackers compromise IoT devices by guessing passwords, while the success rates of password guessing algorithms (especially targeted guessing) are disturbingly high. However, the authors fail to consider such attacks. The authors shall briefly discuss this.

http://www.aeys.org/thread-3520-1-1.html

 

4. The authors shall explain why their new proposal is new, while there are a number of related works.

 

In all, this paper should undergo major revision before acceptance. 

Author Response

We are thankful to the editor and both reviewers for providing great remarks to improve the quality of the paper. We have done revisions and provided responses to the queries of the reviewers. We are hopeful that the revision can be considered for acceptance.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I recommend to accept this paper. 

Reviewer 2 Report

The revised version has addressed most of my concerns, and I suggest an acceptance.