Abusing Cloud-Based Browsers for Fun and Profit by Vasant Tendulkar, Joe Pletcher, Ashwin Shashidharan, Ryan Snyder, Kevin Butler and William Enck.
Abstract:
Cloud services have become a cheap and popular means of computing. They allow users to synchronize data between devices and relieve low-powered devices from heavy computations. In response to the surge of smartphones and mobile devices, several cloud-based Web browsers have become commercially available. These “cloud browsers” assemble and render Web pages within the cloud, executing JavaScript code for the mobile client. This paper explores how the computational abilities of cloud browsers may be exploited through a Browser MapReduce (BMR) architecture for executing large, parallel tasks. We explore the computation and memory limits of four cloud browsers, and demonstrate the viability of BMR by implementing a client based on a reverse engineering of the Puffin cloud browser. We implement and test three canonical MapReduce applications (word count, distributed grep, and distributed sort). While we perform experiments on relatively small amounts of data (100 MB) for ethical considerations, our results strongly suggest that current cloud browsers are a viable source of arbitrary free computing at large scale.
Excellent work on extending the use of cloud-based browsers. Whether you intend to use them for good or ill.
The use of messaging as opposed to passage of data is particularly interesting.
Shouldn’t that work for the process of merging as well?
Comments/suggestions?