A recent study by researchers at North Carolina State University and the University of Oregon describes a threat scenario that allows attackers to exploit cloud-based resources for malicious purposes like cracking passwords or launching denial-of-service attacks. The study has gotten a lot of attention, including articles in reputable sources like Dark Reading, Ars Technica and Network World.
In order to optimize the performance of mobile apps or browsers, some computation-heavy functions have been offloaded to cloud-based resources, which in turn access backend resources and Web pages. This creates a middle ground in the cloud that is exploited in the attack, which the authors call “Browser Map Reduce (BMR)”. In reading the paper, it’s clear that this is a legitimate threat. The authors actually carried it out using free resources, although they limited the scope in order not to be abusive.