Review History


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Summary

  • The initial submission of this article was received on March 13th, 2023 and was peer-reviewed by 3 reviewers and the Academic Editor.
  • The Academic Editor made their initial decision on April 4th, 2023.
  • The first revision was submitted on May 22nd, 2023 and was reviewed by 1 reviewer and the Academic Editor.
  • The article was Accepted by the Academic Editor on June 6th, 2023.

Version 0.2 (accepted)

· Jun 6, 2023 · Academic Editor

Accept

Congratulations, the reviewer is satisfied with the revision of the manuscript and suggested the 'accept' decision.

[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Sedat Akleylek, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]

Reviewer 1 ·

Basic reporting

Author has done requested change, the quality of the paper is enhanced compared with the previous version..
The paper can be accepted in the present form

Experimental design

no comment

Validity of the findings

no comment

Additional comments

no comment

Version 0.1 (original submission)

· Apr 4, 2023 · Academic Editor

Major Revisions

Based on the reviewers’ comments, you may resubmit the revised manuscript for further consideration. Please consider the reviewers’ comments carefully and submit a list of responses to the comments along with the revised manuscript. The paper can only be accepted if all the reviewers' comments have been addressed and agreed upon by the reviewers in the next round of reviews. Best of luck!

Reviewer 1 ·

Basic reporting

This paper suggests a decentralized, secure, and privacy-friendly process that can both protect individual privacy rights and deliver cost-effective data to governments and public health departments, particularly with respect to immunizations. Authors have demonstrated the importance of their work. However, the paper quality might be enhanced by following those suggestions:

1* please rewrite the abstract is too long
2* Write the complet words of abriviation before it use (even if you have done that in the abstract repeat the same in the main text)
3* rewrite the last paragraph in the introduction
4* in section 2 related works, you should to structuctred the text in paragraphes.
5* What are your main results? What conclusions can you draw from the results?
6* Please make your summary more specific and quantitative in its results while it suits a wider audience.
7*add more refrence especially the published works in 2022 and 2023

Experimental design

This paper suggests a decentralized, secure, and privacy-friendly process that can both protect individual privacy rights and deliver cost-effective data to governments and public health departments, particularly with respect to immunizations. Authors have demonstrated the importance of their work. However, the paper quality might be enhanced by following those suggestions:

1* please rewrite the abstract is too long
2* Write the complet words of abriviation before it use (even if you have done that in the abstract repeat the same in the main text)
3* rewrite the last paragraph in the introduction
4* in section 2 related works, you should to structuctred the text in paragraphes.
5* What are your main results? What conclusions can you draw from the results?
6* Please make your summary more specific and quantitative in its results while it suits a wider audience.
7*add more refrence especially the published works in 2022 and 2023

Validity of the findings

This paper suggests a decentralized, secure, and privacy-friendly process that can both protect individual privacy rights and deliver cost-effective data to governments and public health departments, particularly with respect to immunizations. Authors have demonstrated the importance of their work. However, the paper quality might be enhanced by following those suggestions:

1* please rewrite the abstract is too long
2* Write the complet words of abriviation before it use (even if you have done that in the abstract repeat the same in the main text)
3* rewrite the last paragraph in the introduction
4* in section 2 related works, you should to structuctred the text in paragraphes.
5* What are your main results? What conclusions can you draw from the results?
6* Please make your summary more specific and quantitative in its results while it suits a wider audience.
7*add more refrence especially the published works in 2022 and 2023

Additional comments

This paper suggests a decentralized, secure, and privacy-friendly process that can both protect individual privacy rights and deliver cost-effective data to governments and public health departments, particularly with respect to immunizations. Authors have demonstrated the importance of their work. However, the paper quality might be enhanced by following those suggestions:

1* please rewrite the abstract is too long
2* Write the complet words of abriviation before it use (even if you have done that in the abstract repeat the same in the main text)
3* rewrite the last paragraph in the introduction
4* in section 2 related works, you should to structuctred the text in paragraphes.
5* What are your main results? What conclusions can you draw from the results?
6* Please make your summary more specific and quantitative in its results while it suits a wider audience.
7*add more refrence especially the published works in 2022 and 2023

Reviewer 2 ·

Basic reporting

This work proposes a digital health passport that would tackle the problem of sharing data anonymously and provide free movement through the intersection of data. The digital health passport contains all the health-related information of an individual, it interacts with other parties in a decentralized manner to overcome bandwidth overhead and internet traffic problems with cross-border data privacy regulation compliance. Some points need to be addressed.
1. Author have used very long sentences, sometimes the reader loses interest or points out what he wants to make. The paper needs proofreading. Also, there are multiple formatting and typo errors in the article which need to be corrected.
2. The author has provided sufficient background knowledge and a literature review.
3. Most of the contributions mentioned are the benefits associated with the proposed system, the intersection of digital health passport data and institutional databases data is the actual contribution of this work. Also, methods to provide data evaporation or expire vaccination, interoperability and integrity of data described in the contribution section have not been discussed clearly in the article. furthermore, the first contribution in line 106 is to preserve complete privacy, however, the term complete privacy has not been defined.

Experimental design

1. Components of Figrue 2 and Figure 3 need more discussion, e.g. Figure 3 represents the component of SMDPA like homomorphic encryption, and the pailier cryptosystem is not detailed in the article.
2. The dataset used for experimentation has not been described appropriately. It is recommended to include benchmark dataset in the experimentation.
3. Authors are suggested to discuss reasons why algorithm 2 performs better than algorithm 1.
4. Figure 7 and Figure 8 have not been discussed.
5. What threshold values for levels 1, 2, or 3 have been set and why? not discussed clearly.

Validity of the findings

The authors are suggested to evaluate privacy with the benchmark techniques.

The results should also be associated with each of the contributions claimed in the first section.

Reviewer 3 ·

Basic reporting

The english is clear, but there are occasional typos in the paper.

The paper provides comprehensive background/context.

The graph that is supposed to illustrate the architecture of the proposed solution is not well presented. The paper also fails to properly explain several figures.

The evaluation shows very limited results that's not enough to support the claims of the paper.

The proposed algorithm is not well presented and explained in the paper, How is the cyclic group G used in the algorithm? What does Dj mean?

Experimental design

The evaluation of the paper only measures the CPU usage of the simulation of the proposed method, and compares the performances of the two proposed algorithm.

I fail to understand what's the point of the evaluation, how the results are supposed to support the claims of the paper. The paper fails to explain the CPU usage figures, in Fig 7, what does the "Iteration" label of the x axis and "utilization rate" label of the y axis mean? In Fig 8 what does the "Date" under x axis mean? What does each line in the graph mean? Overall, I don't understand what these measurements are supposed to prove.

The evaluation doesn't compare the proposed method to any other existing approaches, so I don't see how the proposed approach provides any improvement.

Validity of the findings

Firstly, I'm not convinced with the motivation of the paper. The paper aims to preserve the privacy of user data and also the privacy of the information from the authority, so that for example the proposed method allows "Identify visitors who visited countries with high infection rates without identifying the countries or placing travel restrictions." I find this disturbing because such rules set by the authority should not be hidden as secret and should be public and under public scrutiny to prevent abuse of power.

The evaluation is limited and doesn't compare the proposed method with any other existing approaches so the validity and novelty of the proposed method is unclear.

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