Hector: Using Untrusted Browsers to Provision Web Applications
This addresses the need for scalable and cost-effective web application provisioning for service providers and users, though it is an incremental improvement building on existing technologies like WebAssembly and WebRTC.
The paper tackles the problem of high latency and cost in web applications by introducing Hector, a framework that offloads application logic to users' browsers, achieving lower end-user latencies and reduced costs compared to traditional deployments.
Web applications are on the rise and rapidly evolve into more and more mature replacements for their native counterparts. This disruptive trend is mainly driven by the attainment of platform-independence and instant deployability. On top of this, web browsers offer the opportunity for seamless browser-to-browser communication for distributed interaction. In this paper, we present Hector, a novel web application framework that transforms web browsers into a distributed application-centric computing platform. Hector enables offloading application logic to users, thereby improving user experience with lower latencies while generating less costs for service providers. Following the programming paradigm of Function-as-a-Service, applications are decomposed into functions so they can be managed efficiently and deployed in a responsive, scalable and lightweight fashion. In case of client-side resource shortage or unresponsive clients, execution falls back to a traditional cloud-based infrastructure. Hector combines WebAssembly for multi-language computations at near-native speed, WebRTC for browser-to-browser communication and trusted execution as provided by the Intel Software Guard Extensions so browsers can trust each other's computations. We evaluate Hector by implementing a digital assistant as well as a recommendation system. Our evaluation shows that Hector achieves lower end-user latencies while generating less costs than traditional deployments. Additionally, we show that Hector scales linearly with increasing client numbers and can cope well with unresponsive clients.