Modeling Networked Telemetry

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The current work addresses how telemetry applications are uniquely structured with a wide area, local area, and micro area networks representing modern telemetry solutions. The abstract is not clear on several aspects. It should have placed the question addressed in a broad context and highlighted the purpose of the study. Also, no method is described, and no findings are reported.

Some specific comments:

1. The abstract must be rewritten in compliance with the scientific work performed.
2. The graphics quality must be improved. 
3. English needs an in-depth review. Sentences are too long and without punctuation.
4. The manuscript layout should be provided when ending section 1.
5. Figure 1 is very far from its first use.
6. Section 3 is a description of some state-of-the-art, mostly describing references 18 and 19. It seems too long.
7. Until section 3.2, nothing new was presented, and then a very brief description is provided. As such, the novelty is not stated. There isn’t some schema of the architecture, being difficult to understand the author’s purpose.
8. A case study should be provided to frame the present work.

Author Response

1. The abstract must be rewritten in compliance with the scientific work performed.

Abstract is now formatted to emphasis the goal of the scientific work.

2. The graphics quality must be improved. 

Size of the figures and the texts are increased for better visibility.

3. English needs an in-depth review. Sentences are too long and without punctuation.

We attempted to review the English language with better punctuation, shortening long sentences, and increasing the cohesion.

4. The manuscript layout should be provided when ending section 1.

Please see at the end of the Introduction section: we have added a new paragraph describing the article organization

5. Figure 1 is very far from its first use.

The figure is moved closer to where it is referenced first. Please see the revised article. 

6. Section 3 is a description of some state-of-the-art, mostly describing references 18 and 19. It seems too long.

The architecture from references 18-19 is indeed a typical collapsed SCADA and enterprise architecture. The reason why we went to elaborate each segment is to show the mapping to telemetry network with respect to SCADA. How each of the segments in the SCADA network can be aligned with the telemetry network.

7. Until section 3.2, nothing new was presented, and then a very brief description is provided. As such, the novelty is not stated. There isn’t some schema of the architecture, being difficult to understand the author’s purpose.

The goal of the paper is to envision a cohesive Telemetry network architecture with limited resources available for the public. Telemetry networks are classified due to their nature of application in the military. There are no cohesive networks architecture. So we modeled the Telemetry architecture in Figure 7 which is possible not available anywhere. The goal is to lay out a foundation for the network level architecture for following works. That will be developing a telemetry network testbed with a hybrid of virtual and hardware. This testbed will then be used to explore cyber vulnerabilities in the telemetry network. 

8. A case study should be provided to frame the present work.

The work or goal of this paper is abstraction. That is designing the Telemetry network architecture by reviewing both the enterprise and SCADA networks. But future works as mention in point 7 will definitely include a case study. 

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

I have some comments on your article:

1. Authors should consider the new article template.
2. At the end of the Introductions section, there is no information on how the article is organized.
3. Literature should be checked if there are no newer items. Especially from the last 18 months. It would be good to add several references.
4. Please check your literature formatting. Please take note of the editorial requirements.
5. It seems to me that it is not necessary to provide information about the cited article twice, e.g. (Young, 2018a) [3]. Please check this throughout the article.
6. Please improve the quality of the figures.

Author Response

1. Authors should consider the new article template.

I hope now we are using the new template as we are editing on the version supplied by the editors. We have also made modifications on the citation style following the MDPI format.

2. At the end of the Introductions section, there is no information on how the article is organized.

Please  have a look the end of section 1, we added a new paragraph describing the article organization.

3. Literature should be checked if there are no newer items. Especially from the last 18 months. It would be good to add several references.

There are not a lot of work on Telemetry network modeling as most of the works are classified. And our work attempts to bring the telemetry concepts to the broader view so as researchers will have the opportunity to look into this area. We tried as much as possible to include telemetry network modeling research papers. 

4. Please check your literature formatting. Please take note of the editorial requirements.

Fixed with the MDPI formatting by removing the APA citation style. Please see the revised article. 

5. It seems to me that it is not necessary to provide information about the cited article twice, e.g. (Young, 2018a) [3]. Please check this throughout the article.

Fixed with the MDPI formatting, APA citations are avoided.

6. Please improve the quality of the figures.

Some of the figures are increased in size and the text size on most of them are also reformatted for better visibility. Please have a look the new figures. Please see the revised article. 

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors need to make a essential changes in order this scientific report to become a manuscript for publication:

1. The authors do not provide any results regarding their research.
2. Except the figures nothing else seems to be interesting
3. The references are very few and many of them are stale.
4. The authors need to run simulations including reliable scenarios and provide results that will be close to reality.
5. The Conclusion Section need to provide information regarding authors’ contribution to the science and future work.

Author Response

1. The authors do not provide any results regarding their research.

The main goal of this paper is to envision the telemetry network architecture which is normally a classified network. The first step in our work is addressing the abstraction level.  Future work will develop a cyber telemetry testbed for vulnerability analysis based on the network modeling which we are currently working on.  The next steps will be using the testbed for vulnerability analysis and formulating cyber models.

2. Except the figures nothing else seems to be interesting

The figures are integral parts of the whole paper. We focused on using the figures as they explain the concepts of telemetry network in a brief way which is rather vast. As describing the concepts in  each picture in detail will be almost impossible to contain in our work. 

3. The references are very few and many of them are stale.

We understand the references could be few due to the fact that the telemetry research are limited to few governmental entities. Which are usually are not released for public domain. And most of the references that we could use are from the international telemetering conference participants. And our attempt is to bring the idea of telemetry networks for better exposure.  We have added some additional references. Please see the revised article. 

4. The authors need to run simulations including reliable scenarios and provide results that will be close to reality.

The fact that this is an architectural approach at the beginning of our research makes it difficult to show "experimental" results that confirm our thesis. But we are working on setting up a testbed that is based on the proposal presented in this work. Future work will definitely present our experiments and results from our model. We are currently working on follow up works. 

5. The Conclusion Section need to provide information regarding authors’ contribution to the science and future work.

Please see the reformatted conclusion which highlights the future work to follow. That will be setting up and configuring a hybrid ( both hardware and virtual machine) based telemetry testbed. Explore different domains of cyber vulnerability analysis. Looking into different threat actors with emphasis on insider attacks. Modeling and developing cyber defense methodologies.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I believe that the necessary changes have been made.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

Thank you very much for introducing changes that have improved the quality of the article.
I have no more comments.

Best regards

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript now is ready to be published