PONE-D-21-31321Coverage-guided differential testing of TLS implementations based on syntax mutationPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Zhu,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Licheng Wang

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: I Don't Know

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: This paper offers a solution to efficiently find differences in the TLS protocol handshake process.

The experimental results proved the method is effective.

However, there are some editorial errors, such as

P2 99：

“243,246 certificates were collected over the network, and the set of the Frankencerts certificate 100 was generated by randomly changing the fields in the certificate. ”

In addition, figures should locate above the caption. It took me a lot of effort to find them.

Reviewer #2: In this paper, the authors propose a hybrid methodology to find differences more efficiently by targeting the TLS protocol handshake process, and then help to discovering the vulnerabilities. In addition, they explore the duplicate discrepancies theoretically and give a method of eliminating duplicate discrepancies based on code. By experiment testing on three types of widely used TLS protocol implementations (OpenSSL, BoringSSL, and LibreSSL), it shows that their work can effectively improve the ability to find differences between different implementations. Thus I suggest accept it after some minor modifies.

1. In the article, there are many abbreviations which make reading difficult, so I suggest the authors give an explanation when they first appear, or list a table to explain them.

2. The presentation quality is to be polished. For example,

--line 18 in the Abstract, “the proposed method can effectively improve finding differences between…”: improve ability or speed ??

--line 41-42 on page 2, “the mutation…due to the….and due to the… ”: please delete the second “due to”.

--line 176 on page 5, “First” should be “Firstly”.

--line 206 on page 6, “The related definitions used in this article are introduced below” should be “The related definitions which are used in this…..”

--line 230:"which is are triggered", line 237: "c1,c2 is a ...??".

--line331-332, “there are 1..cases.. ”

--line 337-338, "Due to the ...cased ..use of ???"

Or I suggest the author to find a professional organization to polish English.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Coverage-guided differential testing of TLS implementations based on syntax mutation

PONE-D-21-31321R1

Dear Dr. Zhu,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Licheng Wang

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Based on two round reviewing process, including your responses and revising efforts, we would like to tell you that this paper can be accepted for publication.

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: I Don't Know

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4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively improve the ability to find differences between different implementations. However, the illustration of Table 4 made me confused. I hope it will be improved before publishing.

Reviewer #2: In this paper, the authors proposed a method which can effectively improve the ability to find differences between different implementations. And by experiment testing on three types of widely used TLS protocol implementations (OpenSSL, BoringSSL, and LibreSSL), their experimental results also support the ability to find differences between different implementations.

In the revised paper, the authors made a good modification according to the comments of the reviewer, so I would like to recommend acceptance.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No