PACER: Platform for Android Malware Classification, Performance Evaluation and Threat Reporting^†

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This manuscript requires revision of the ideas in some sentences. See for example in the abstract the following from line 4: ...Our earlier work, PACE, which is a unified solution to offer open and easy implementation access to several machine learning-based Android malware detection techniques that make most of the research in this domain reproducible... This sentence needs a justification of action. You may update to the following:...An earlier work named PACE, was introduced as a unified solution to offer open and easy implementation access to several machine learning-based Android malware detection techniques that make most of the research in this domain reproducible...

You should define all acronyms in their first call. In the abstract you have: REST API and ADB, for instance.

In line 21 you call Figure 2 and Figure 1 is called at line 23. You should reorganize the main text to call Figures, tables and Equations in an ascendent way.

The word "solo" in line 26 is a mistake?, do you mean lonely or alone?

Figure 1 can be updated to include statistics of 2020, rather than Android Malware Growth 2012-19. The same is for Figure 2. Smartphone Market Share 2015-19, which needs a reference.

Before submitting a manuscript you are encouraged to verify that all figures, tables and references have their proper information. See for example in line 47, where you forgot the reference...  smartphone [?  ].... you must verify figures, tables and other references marked as ?? in your main text, 

In line 68 you describe an earlier work, you should write in third person, not referring to "our"... and because is an improvement of PACE, you must include the seminal reference when you mention:... Our earlier proposed work...

In between lines 89-90 you forgot including description of Section 4 that is related to describe PACE.

As you highlight that your contribution is

 The major contributions of PACER are:

82  1. Reproducible and Transparent Research

83  2. Improved Android malware detection

84  3. Multi-application integration

85  4. Triaging and Fast Incident Response

86  5. Android Threat Intelligence

87  6. Simple, Descriptive and Readable in-device threat report

You are encouraged to summarize the results in Section 5 and conclude in Section 6. For example, tables 1 and 2 include details that you take from the literature. But in Section 5 you do not perform a similar detailed analyses of the experiments.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We thank the anonymous Reviewer for their efforts and feedback. All the comments and suggestions were very positive and constructive which help us to improve
the manuscript further. We have given our best efforts and addressed all the comments
and revised the manuscript.

Please find point-by-point response in the attached pdf file.

 

Thanking You.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

In this paper, you focus on malware detection for Android-based systems. Building on your earlier work, PACE, in this paper, you present PACER, a report generator module for PACE.

You make a very strong case for the importance of a malware analysis report, and in that aspect, it is clear how PACE would be practical.

What is left unclear, however, are the following questions:

How easy would it be to combine (and/or incorporate) PACER with some other malware analysis tools that are not PACE? How easy would it be for a researcher to customize PACER, and add/remove information from a PACER generated report? How easy would it be for a researcher to use PACER to generate other kinds of reports, beyond generating pdf reports?

Before understanding answer to the outlined questions, it is rather hard to get a good grasp of the PACER's possible impact, so you likely want to address some of these questions in the possible future versions of your manuscript.

Additionally, while your manuscript is generally readable, it could benefit from a language review. There are more than a few sentences (especially in the introduction section) that are generally understandable, but constructed in an unusual way.

Lastly, the literature and existing work section could be significantly improved. In it's current form, it is rather repetitive (especially part 2.1).

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We thank the anonymous Reviewer for their efforts and feedback. All the comments and suggestions were very positive and constructive which help us to improve
the manuscript further. We have given our best efforts and addressed all the comments
and revised the manuscript.

Please find point-by-point response in the attached pdf file.

 

Thanking You.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper shows the ML-based android platform for malware classification. However, this paper does not include any specific schema, detailed method, etc. for the proposed scheme. It just shows a platform architecture for malware classification. Moreover, performance evlauation section does not cover any detailed/specific view. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We thank the anonymous Reviewer for their efforts and feedback. All the comments and suggestions were very positive and constructive which help us to improve
the manuscript further. We have given our best efforts and addressed all the comments
and revised the manuscript.

Please find point-by-point response in the attached pdf file.

 

Thanking You.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The updated version is fine to be accepted

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank for your positive comments and for accepting our responses.

Thanks.

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper is required to indicate how much the proposed framework can provide performance gain and which differentiated points the proposed framework has. For that, it is suggested that how the specific operation procedure/scenario  is done in specific service scenario or implementation view. 

In implementation section, authors are required to add  more detailed image or descriptions for the proposed scheme.

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We thank you for your efforts and feedback. All the comments and suggestions were very positive and constructive which help us to improve the manuscript furthers. We have given our best efforts and addressed all the comments and revised the manuscript. Please find the points-by-points response in the attached document.

I hope you will find our responses satisfactory and will allow for further processing.

Thanks and Regards.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 3 Report

As already said at the previous review, this paper does not show how much the proposed platform has better aspects than existing architecture. It just shows what the proposed platform is and which library architecture/function is utilized, but it does not show detailed operation/example schema. So, it does not provide any specific information for differentiated point and complexity and gains of this platform.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

 

We thank the anonymous Reviewer for their efforts and feedback. All the comments and suggestions were very positive and constructive which help us to improve the manuscript further. We have given our best efforts and addressed all the comments and revised the manuscript.

 

Thanks and Regards.

Dr. Ajit Kumar

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf