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OpenAjax Hub better secures mashups


By Jeff Feinman
August 31, 2009 — 
The OpenAjax Alliance, an industry consortium focused on adoption of AJAX-based Web technologies, has implemented new security features into its defined set of JavaScript functionalities.

OpenAjax Hub 2.0, released today, brings a JavaScript library for Secure Enterprise Mashups that organization executives said can better protect widgets and mashups from hackers. The library isolates third-party widgets into secure sandboxes and manages messaging among the widgets with a security manager.

For example, if a website includes a third-party calendar widget, the widget itself might become malicious if its code has vulnerabilities. Hub 2.0 can prevent attacks by isolating non-trusted widgets from an application and by preventing access to user credentials.

“We looked at how to take enterprise data and create a mashup from it with data that could be coming from different domains outside of my secure area,” said David Boloker, OpenAjax Alliance steering committee chairman and CTO of emerging Internet technologies for IBM.

“That’s why we implemented sandboxing, where my widget can’t talk to any other widget unless I enable it. I might be able to get, for example, the data of all the accounts on my page, but no other widget, malicious or not, can get that same data unless I decide to enable them.”

Hub 2.0 also introduces a feature called Managed Hub, which allows the creation of both developer-built mashups and end-user-built mashups. Hub 1.0 only allowed for mashups built by developers. The Managed Hub ensures security by preventing sandboxed components from accessing the JavaScript of the host application or other components.

Hub 2.0 is available as both a specification and an open-source implementation. The Hub 2.0 specification was recently approved by OpenAjax Alliance members as an AJAX industry standard. The specification defines standardized JavaScript APIs for secure mashups to foster interoperability among mashups and mashup components. The open-source implementation is written in JavaScript and is compatible with all desktop browsers, according to Boloker.

Other members of the OpenAjax Alliance include JackBe, Microsoft, RadWeb Technologies, Software AG and TIBCO.

“OpenAjax Hub 2.0 is a very important advance for the industry,” said Howard Weingram, principal architect for TIBCO Software. “For the first time, implementers can securely combine standardized widgets and components from different sources, including those with very different trust profiles.”

When asked how AJAX fits into the rich Internet application landscape with Adobe and Microsoft consistently updating Flash and Silverlight, respectively, Boloker said the OpenAjax Alliance is solely focused on openness and interoperability of AJAX applications.

“We really don’t per se worry about how Silverlight 3.0 is going to interoperate with JavaScript. That’s more of Microsoft’s problem,” he said. “It just so happens that both Adobe and Microsoft pretty much ensured that standard JavaScript will interface with Flash and Silverlight. But the OpenAjax Alliance is all about the open Web, making sure that all the widgets will work, and that if someone wants to create a Web page that has disparate widgets, we can make them communicate securely.”


Related Search Term(s): Java, OpenAjax


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