The misuse of cloud browsers adds to cloud computing threats

Through the misuse of cloud browsers such as Amazon Silk, Cloud Browse, Opera Mini and Puffin, anonymous access to large-scale cloud computing tasks is no doubt a bombshell that has thrown off a heavy bomb in a precarious cloud security trust.

Security researchers show that cloud computing can be used indiscriminately without cost, as long as it can find out where its processing cycles are. Just as Amazon and Google launched a raging cloud-computing price war, no cloud-computing company could beat the price offered by academic computer researchers: totally free.

Other security researchers have demonstrated ways to crack security vulnerabilities through cloud computing resources. For example, Moxie Marlinspike through its cloudcraker online password cracking service, showing how to use the Cloud server computing resources to crack the network password, but the crack computing services to be charged.

William Enck, an assistant professor of computer science at the State University of North Carolina, co-authored the so-called browser MapReduce (BMR) technology in his paper with 5 other authors. MapReduce is a technology that Google has developed for parallel operations of large data.

Browser MapReduce can aggregate the free JavaScript processing resources provided from cloud browsing and handle the MapReduce job in conjunction with resource scheduling, which frees up the default and operational limitations of the Cloud browser vendor.

The BMR successfully demonstrated a new method of performing parasitic operations (parasitic computing) by careful collaboration, the paper points out. Through free storage, BMR can rely on bit.ly short Web site services for experimentation, encoding data from URL URLs can be saved and accessed through the bit.ly API.

The paper authors also show that turning cloud browsers into insecure mail servers. Through cloud page rendering (Rendering), cloud computing providers become open operations centers, and in the same way, improperly configured mail servers, their open relay (Relay) features are fully activated, and thus risk being hacked into spam-spamming tools, they say.