Blockchain-Enabled Chebyshev Polynomial-Based Group Authentication for Secure Communication in an Internet of Things Network

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1.     The introduction is too weak. The introduction should indicate the research gaps and research goals. What is the main question addressed by the research?

2.     The introduction should cite some related works to illustrate the research background. And propose your research goals.

3.     In the Methodology section, the authors should use a flowchart to describe the proceeding flowchart. For example, use a standard flowchart to illustrate the process. Use an elliptical graph to illustrate the “start” and “end”, use the diamond graph to illustrate the judgment events.

4. What does it add to the subject area compared with other published material?

5. What specific improvements could the authors consider regarding the methodology?

6. No comparison with related works, it is hard to persuade readers.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

The article is quite interesting and written on a relevant topic. The problem of the authenticity of Internet of Things nodes is definitely relevant and will become even more important in the future.

However, the work also has a number of disadvantages:

1 Obviously too short and unstructured literature review. The importance of work does not follow from it. For example, the question of the communication of IoT nodes with those belonging to other networks remains not covered enough. Other authentication methods are also insufficiently studied. Do Chebyshev polynomials really have an edge?

2 The style of the article sometimes does not meet the standards of a scientific article. For example " Chebyshev polynomial exhibits astonishing properties……", The Chebyshev polynomial has many remarkable properties but for cryptography 92

applications semigroup property is the most important one [ 16 ]. There are more expressions of this type. The extended formula (3) would only be suitable for a textbook.

 

3. Experimental results are full of details that have no value. For example ".... 100.88 ms for digit length 4 to 20090.05 ms for digit length 6". These numbers without statistics and errors have little value. The main result of the experimental analysis that 4-digit Chebyshev polynomials are long enough remains unfounded . Also, security properties of them are not discussed

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Reviewer 3 Report

This paper propose a blockchain-enabled Chebyshev group authentication framework for Internet of Things (IoT) network, and this study comparing the time of key generation and encryption and decryption under Chebyshev with different digit lengths and obtained the range of digit length in line with reality. The authors tested the proposed authentication framework on Blockchain-related parameters by deploying the smart contract on Ethereum’s Goerli testnet..

Although this paper is structurally complete and logically clear, there are a few problems in the manuscript, which needs the author to modify for being accepted. The problems in the manuscript are shown below in detail.

1.       In step 7 of Algorithm 1, the definition of receive_value wasn’t given.

2.       The time consumption of key generation, encryption and decryption with different digit length is given. The authors may consider adding comparison of time consumption of group verification with different number of devices.

3.       The number of references is small and authors should consider adding more references.

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The previous concerns have been fixed.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

My comment 2 in the previous report is addressed only partially. Comment 3  from my point of view is not addressed at all

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Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

The added section 5 provides no proof of security. There is only some discussion about it.  4-digit long Chebyshev polynomial degree is suggested only on the base of speed of calculation, but not security. Maybe 2 or 3 digits are enough?

In the discussion all results are based on calculations without evaluation of accuracy. All presented numbers with three digits after comma are useless. 

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