Forensic Analysis of IoT File Systems for Linux-Compatible Platforms

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (New Reviewer)

REVIEWER’S COMMENTS TO AUTHORS

 

1)      Several English grammar errors must be carefully checked and corrected.

2)      More recently published ISI papers related to the theme “Forensic Analysis of IoT File Systems for Internet Platforms” can be added to references in order to prove the novelty and originality of authors’ comparison analysis.

3)      In Section V, it is adequate to carry on the forensic analysis only over the file systems VDFS, JFFS2 and UBIFS which used on the Tizen and Linux platforms only.

4)      A nomenclature is required to clarify all symbols and important acronyms.

5)      The principal restrictions of this study are necessary to be fully and analytically added in the end of Section VI.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

Kindly see below for specific comments;

-Intro needs expansion and should include related literature

-Figure annotation should be considered in order to bolster clarity

-The content and structure of the manuscript should be outlined as part of the introduction

-A pathway for future work should be outlined in the conclusion

-The list of Refs should be bolstered

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Summery: The authors conducted a security analysis with forensic perspective on IoT  platform filesystem used in various environment. analyzing the data storage structure and security issues of the platform, the security of IoT devices to be developed in the future can be improved. In addition, they present an approach for analyzing the platform mounted on IoT devices using filesystem forensics. The proposed approach allows for referencing when analyzing IoT devices platforms that are newly developed or difficult to recognize.

Strengthen points:
-contributions are clear and well defined.

Weaknesses:
-The introduction and related works sections are too short.
-the paper looks more like a technical report rather than a research paper, as the theoretical part is too short and the experiment sections are too long.

Comments:
-IoT devices are lightweight and usually use some other operating system such as Tiny OS, why don't conduct your experiment is lightweight OS as well?

-some related works are missing:
[1] Lee, H. B., & Chung, T. Y. (2015). A Virtual File System for IoT Service Platform Based on Linux FUSE. IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications, 10(3), 139-150.
[2]Dhelim, Sahraoui, Huansheng Ning, Fadi Farha, Liming Chen, Luigi Atzori, and Mahmoud Daneshmand. "IoT-enabled social relationships meet artificial social intelligence." IEEE Internet of Things Journal 8, no. 24 (2021): 17817-17828.

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I appreciate the opportunity to review this study. I think that from a technical perspective the work is interesting, although many decisions made by the authors are not properly presented and justified. However, the main problem with this manuscript is its low contextualization and scientific relevance. The authors use only 20 scientific references in the manuscript. This is unacceptable for a journal with high scientific impact.

The topic of Digital Forensics and Internet of Things (IoT) has been much debated in the international literature. The review work done by the authors is insufficient and seriously flawed. Much deeper literature review work needs to be done on the topic.

The originality of this study is also unclear. The relevance of the work done by the authors needs to be demonstrated. The fieldwork appears to be interesting but then the connection with the case study is not clear. The discussion of the results is very weak as the results obtained are not compared with other published work. Finally, the authors should address the theoretical and practical contributions of this study.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

 

The following should be noted and corrected accordingly:

1. How practicable is your proposed model in real-time? 

2. Is it cost-efficient?

3. Some diagrams and terms are not properly explained.

4. Grammar is not up to standard and requires extensive re-editing

5. Are the formulas and numbers here generic or generated by you?

6. The Related Work section is too brief and needs to be more comprehensive

7. No information is given as to the future possible direction of the paper 

 

 

 

 

Study and consider the following related papers to embellish your paper:

• https://doi.org/10.3390/s22031076

• https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egyr.2022.02.304

• doi: 10.1109/TII.2021.3140109.

 

 

 

Major revisions are required.

 

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

thank you for addressing my comments.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I consider that the authors have made some relevant improvements in the study. However, and despite the effort of the authors, the paper is still far from being accepted. I think that the authors have little scientific experience. It is not possible to accept a study with 26 references in a world top journal in an area where there are many scientific studies. It is impossible to write a paper in this field with a solid theoretical contextualization with less than 50 references.

Some improvement suggestion that are crucial:

- 2.1 section is written without any reference

- It would be relevant to include a new section entitled digital forensic. Perhaps before or after the section 2.1

- Related work section need to be ordered by year of the publication of the studies. Currently it is too confused.

- Please verify if Figure 1 is original or adapted from a previous source. Same applies to Figure 2.

- I don’t understand the relevance of Figure 19

- It is not clear how the data extracted from the case study is measured. Additionally, it would be interesting to have at least two case studies and compare the different outcomes.

- Authors write the Discussions section without comparing with previous published studies.

- Conclusions must explicit address the theoretical and practical contributions.

- Authors should also address the limitations of their study.

- This sentence needs to be extended and properly explained: “The results of this study will also contribute toward  improving the overall security technology of the IoT platform and obtaining evidence in the event of a crime.”

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

 

The following should be noted and corrected accordingly:

1. How practicable is your proposed model in real-time? 

2. Is it cost-efficient?

3. Some diagrams and terms are not properly explained.

4. Grammar is not up to standard and requires extensive re-editing

5. Are the formulas and numbers here generic or generated by you?

 

 

 

 

Study and consider the following related papers to embellish your paper:

• https://doi.org/10.3390/s20092609

• doi: 10.1109/JIOT.2021.3050755.

• https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egyr.2022.02.304

 

 

 

Minor revisions are required.

 

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

I appreciate the authors' resilience in attempting to publish this study. Several vulnerabilities remain, but I believe that the review work done allows me to change my decision to major revisions. I will explicitly assist the authors in each section of the manuscript:

1. Abstract looks ok.

2. Introduction is acceptable.

3. Literature review is weak. Authors must explore the problematic of digital forensic in the context of IoT. Some useful references to be considered by the authors:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3297280.3297659

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1807/1807.10438.pdf

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8831387

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1361372315300452

https://commons.erau.edu/jdfsl/vol16/iss2/4/

https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/wfs2.1385

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1179/1/012140/meta

https://pure.hud.ac.uk/en/publications/internet-of-things-devices-digital-forensic-process-and-data-redu

https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/11/7/1126

4. Analysis of results is ok

5. Discussion section is weak. I insist on the need to ground various statements in the literature. Some examples:

“In particular, this study conducted a study on VDFS, which has not been covered much so far.” Where is it covered?

“In addition, it is differentiated from existing studies by analyzing metadata of some file systems mounted on IoT….” Which studies?

“It also requires analysis of some metadata, which has some limitations in finding the data in the desired file” Give concrete examples. The notion of some is not conclusive.

Also please compare your approach against other published approaches published in the literature. This kind of work was not performed.

6. Conclusion section is ok.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx