Collected research

Parasitic computing using 'Cloud Browsers'

NC State News :: NC State News and Information » Researchers ID Ways to Exploit ‘Cloud Browsers’ for Large-Scale, Anonymous Computing

Matt Shipman · news.ncsu.edu

An NC State release for the ACSAC 2012 paper "Abusing Cloud-Based Browsers for Fun and Profit". Cloud browsers render pages server-side, so the team built a Browser MapReduce client on a reverse-engineered Puffin and passed data between nodes as URL-shortener links. Word count, distributed grep and sort ran on 100MB of free, anonymous compute.

Record

Document

NC State News :: NC State News and Information » Researchers ID Ways to Exploit ‘Cloud Browsers’ for Large-Scale, Anonymous Computing

Researcher

Matt Shipman

Published by

news.ncsu.edu

Topic

Browser

In the archive

• Collected in the 2012 research round

Related sources

• New Hack Abuses Cloud-Based Browsers

Tags

• javascript
• measurement-study
• case-study

This page is the archive's own catalogue record. The research is the work of Matt Shipman, first published at the original source. Preserved copies are kept so the citation survives its host; this one was last captured on 9 August 2026.