Cheng Wang^1,2,*, Zhuowei Zheng¹

CMES-Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, Vol.138, No.2, pp. 1563-1592, 2024, DOI:10.32604/cmes.2023.031103

Abstract The advent of Industry 4.0 has compelled businesses to adopt digital approaches that combine software to enhance production efficiency. In this rapidly evolving market, software development is an ongoing process that must be tailored to meet the dynamic needs of enterprises. However, internal research and development can be prohibitively expensive, driving many enterprises to outsource software development and upgrades to external service providers. This paper presents a software upgrade outsourcing model for enterprises and service providers that accounts for the impact of market fluctuations on software adaptability. To mitigate the risk of adverse selection due to asymmetric information about the… More >

Atif Ikram^1,2,*, Masita Abdul Jalil¹, Amir Bin Ngah¹, Adel Sulaiman³, Muhammad Akram³, Ahmad Salman Khan⁴

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.74, No.3, pp. 5035-5048, 2023, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2023.034692

Abstract The successful execution and management of Offshore Software Maintenance Outsourcing (OSMO) can be very beneficial for OSMO vendors and the OSMO client. Although a lot of research on software outsourcing is going on, most of the existing literature on offshore outsourcing deals with the outsourcing of software development only. Several frameworks have been developed focusing on guiding software system managers concerning offshore software outsourcing. However, none of these studies delivered comprehensive guidelines for managing the whole process of OSMO. There is a considerable lack of research working on managing OSMO from a vendor’s perspective. Therefore, to find the best practices… More >

Atif Ikram^1,2,*, Masita Abdul Jalil¹, Amir Bin Ngah¹, Saqib Raza⁶, Ahmad Salman Khan³, Yasir Mahmood^3,4, Nazri Kama⁴, Azri Azmi⁴, Assad Alzayed⁵

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.74, No.1, pp. 1871-1886, 2023, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2023.030818

Abstract Software maintenance is the process of fixing, modifying, and improving software deliverables after they are delivered to the client. Clients can benefit from offshore software maintenance outsourcing (OSMO) in different ways, including time savings, cost savings, and improving the software quality and value. One of the hardest challenges for the OSMO vendor is to choose a suitable project among several clients’ projects. The goal of the current study is to recommend a machine learning-based decision support system that OSMO vendors can utilize to forecast or assess the project of OSMO clients. The projects belong to OSMO vendors, having offices in… More >

Atif Ikram^1,2,*, Masita Abdul Jalil¹, Amir Bin Ngah¹, Nadeem Iqbal², Nazri Kama⁴, Azri Azmi⁴, Ahmad Salman Khan³, Yasir Mahmood^3,4, Assad Alzayed⁵

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.73, No.2, pp. 3827-3845, 2022, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2022.029609

Abstract Properly created and securely communicated, non-disclosure agreement (NDA) can resolve most of the common disputes related to outsourcing of offshore software maintenance (OSMO). Occasionally, these NDAs are in the form of images. Since the work is done offshore, these agreements or images must be shared through the Internet or stored over the cloud. The breach of privacy, on the other hand, is a potential threat for the image owners as both the Internet and cloud servers are not void of danger. This article proposes a novel algorithm for securing the NDAs in the form of images. As an agreement is… More >

Jian Tang, Zhihua Xia^*, Lan Wang, Chengsheng Yuan, Xueli Zhao

Journal on Big Data, Vol.3, No.1, pp. 21-33, 2021, DOI:10.32604/jbd.2021.015892

Abstract As the wide application of imaging technology, the number of big image data which may containing private information is growing fast. Due to insufficient computing power and storage space for local server device, many people hand over these images to cloud servers for management. But actually, it is unsafe to store the images to the cloud, so encryption becomes a necessary step before uploading to reduce the risk of privacy leakage. However, it is not conducive to the efficient application of image, especially in the Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) scheme. This paper proposes an outsourcing privacypreserving JPEG CBIR scheme. We… More >

Jun Ye^a, Xianlin Zhou^b, Zheng Xu^c, Yong Ding^d

Intelligent Automation & Soft Computing, Vol.24, No.1, pp. 41-46, 2018, DOI:10.1080/10798587.2016.1267239

Abstract In big data era, people cannot afford more and more complex computation work due to the constrained computation resources. The high reliability, strong processing capacity, large storage space of cloud computing makes the resource-constrained clients remotely operate the heavy computation task with the help of cloud server. In this paper, a new algorithm for secure outsourcing of high degree polynomials is proposed. We introduce a camouflage technique, which the real polynomial will be disguised to the untrusted cloud server. In addition, the input and output will not be revealed in the computation process and the clients can easily verify the… More >

Leqi Jiang^{1, 2}, Zhangjie Fu^{1, 2, *}

Journal of Cyber Security, Vol.2, No.1, pp. 49-61, 2020, DOI:10.32604/jcs.2020.09308

Abstract Genetic Algorithm (GA) has been widely used to solve various optimization problems. As the solving process of GA requires large storage and computing resources, it is well motivated to outsource the solving process of GA to the cloud server. However, the algorithm user would never want his data to be disclosed to cloud server. Thus, it is necessary for the user to encrypt the data before transmitting them to the server. But the user will encounter a new problem. The arithmetic operations we are familiar with cannot work directly in the ciphertext domain. In this paper, a privacy-preserving outsourced genetic… More >

Zhen Yang^1,2, Yongfeng Huang^1,2,*, Xing Li^1,2, Wenyu Wang³

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.56, No.1, pp. 1-17, 2018, DOI: 10.3970/cmc.2018.03697

Abstract To cope with privacy leakage caused by multimedia outsourcing and sharing, data provenance is used to analyze leaked multimedia and provide reactive accountability. Existing schemes of multimedia provenance are based on watermarking protocols. In an outsourcing scenario, existing schemes face two severe challenges: 1) when data leakage occurs, there exists a probability that data provenance results can be repudiated, in which case data provenance tracking fails; and 2) when outsourced data are shared, data encryption transfer causes key management burden outside the schemes, and privacy leakage threatens users. In this paper, we propose a novel data provenance scheme with an… More >

Lizhi Xiong^1,*, Yunqing Shi²

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.55, No.3, pp. 523-539, 2018, DOI: 10.3970/cmc.2018.01791

Abstract Advanced cloud computing technology provides cost saving and flexibility of services for users. With the explosion of multimedia data, more and more data owners would outsource their personal multimedia data on the cloud. In the meantime, some computationally expensive tasks are also undertaken by cloud servers. However, the outsourced multimedia data and its applications may reveal the data owner’s private information because the data owners lose the control of their data. Recently, this thought has aroused new research interest on privacy-preserving reversible data hiding over outsourced multimedia data. In this paper, two reversible data hiding schemes are proposed for encrypted… More >