Abusing Cloud-based Browsers for Fun and Profit Vasant Tendulkar Joe Pletcher Ashwin Shashidharan NC State University University of Oregon NC State University
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Ryan Snyder Kevin Butler William Enck University of Oregon University of Oregon NC State University
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT tures have deployed infrastructures for rendering Web pages Cloud services have become a cheap and popular means of in the cloud (e.g., Amazon Silk [5], Opera Mini [24], and Puf- computing. They allow users to synchronize data between fin [12]). The obvious benefit to this architecture is relieving devices and relieve low-powered devices from heavy com- the mobile device from the graphical rendering. However, putations. In response to the surge of smartphones and this is less of a concern for newer, more powerful smart- mobile devices, several cloud-based Web browsers have be- phones. Such devices benefit more from the cloud server come commercially available. These \cloud browsers" as- downloading the many parts of a Web page using high- semble and render Web pages within the cloud, executing bandwidth links and only using the higher-latency, last-mile JavaScript code for the mobile client. This paper explores wireless network once. Proxy-based Web page rendering has how the computational abilities of cloud browsers may be ex- existed in literature for more than a decade [17, 16, 20, 8, 9] ploited through a Browser MapReduce (BMR) architecture and is of continued interest [10, 31]; however, it was not until for executing large, parallel tasks.