In light of the COVID-19 outbreak caused by the novel coronavirus, companies and institutions have instructed their employees to work from home as a precautionary measure to reduce the risk of contagion. Employees, however, have been exposed to different security risks because of working from home. Moreover, the rapid global spread of COVID-19 has increased the volume of data generated from various sources. Working from home depends mainly on cloud computing (CC) applications that help employees to efficiently accomplish their tasks. The cloud computing environment (CCE) is an unsung hero in the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. It consists of the fast-paced practices for services that reflect the trend of rapidly deployable applications for maintaining data. Despite the increase in the use of CC applications, there is an ongoing research challenge in the domains of CCE concerning data, guaranteeing security, and the availability of CC applications. This paper, to the best of our knowledge, is the first paper that thoroughly explains the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on CCE. Additionally, this paper also highlights the security risks of working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Network traffic prediction plays a vital role in effective network management, load evaluation and security warning. Extreme learning machine has the advantages of fast convergence speed and strong generalization ability. Also, it does not easily fall into local optima. The evolutionary algorithm can be used to optimize the number of its hidden layer nodes. However, most of the existing evolutionary algorithms have some adjustable parameters which depend on subjective experience or prior knowledge. Hence, this can affect the model prediction accuracy. Given this context, this paper proposes a network traffic prediction mechanism based on optimized Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) and Integrated Extreme Learning Machine (ELM). A Scalable Artificial Bee Colony (SABC) algorithm which has fewer adjustable parameters and can thus guarantee the accuracy and stability of the prediction mechanism is also proposed. It can be used in the optimization selection of VMD, Phase Space Reconstruction (PSR) and ELM to achieve higher prediction performance. Finally, we utilize Mackey-Glass, Lorenz chaotic time series of recognized benchmark and a WIDE backbone actual network traffic data to prove the validity of the proposed network traffic prediction mechanism.

The deployment of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) has progressed at a rapid pace. IPv6 has introduced new features and capabilities that is not available in IPv4. However, new security risks and challenges emerge with any new technology. Similarly, Duplicate Address Detection (DAD), part of Neighbor Discovery Protocol in IPv6 protocol, is subject to security threats such as denial-of-service attacks. This paper presents a comprehensive review on detection and defense mechanisms for DAD on fixed network. The strengths and weaknesses of each mechanism to Secure-DAD process are discussed from the perspective of implementation and processing time. Finally, challenges and future directions are presented along with feature requirements for the new security mechanism to secure DAD procedure in an IPv6 link-local network.