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OpenAjax Alliance Moves Towards More Secure Mashups

The OpenAjax Alliance has announced approval and availability of OpenAjax Hub 2.0 as an industry standard for more secure Web 2.0 mashup applications. Advances in security in Hub 2.0 can help protect enterprise mashups from malicious intent, giving IT staff greater confidence in adding these features to their Web sites.

The major addition to Hub 2.0 is a JavaScript Library for Secure Enterprise Mashups created to better protect widgets and mashups from hackers and malicious intent. It addresses concerns among IT managers that may have inhibited adoption of mashup software within companies.

"OpenAjax Hub 2.0 is a major step forward for the OpenAjax Alliance towards its mission of promoting Ajax interoperability," says the OpenAjax Alliance's David Boloker. "In order to realize the potential for mashups across the industry, there needs to be standards. Hub 2.0 defines a key industry standard for how widgets can be isolated into secure containers and then how widgets can talk to each other through a mediated messaging bus."

Hub 2.0 isolates third-party widgets into secure sandboxes and mediates messaging among the widgets with a security manager. For example, suppose a Web site includes a third-party calendar widget. That widget itself might be malicious or might become malicious if its code has vulnerabilities that allow a site to hijack the widget. Malicious widgets could transmit hijacked data to a scamming web site or piggyback user credentials to read and write from company servers. Hub 2.0 prevents attacks by isolating untrusted widgets from the main application and other widgets, and by preventing access to user credentials. It protects against widget hijacking due to its features around careful widget loading and unloading and message integrity.

The OpenAjax Alliance is an organization of vendors, open source projects and companies using Ajax that are dedicated to the successful adoption of open and interoperable Ajax-based Web technologies. OpenAjax members include more than 100 organizations including Adobe, the Eclipse Foundation, Google, IBM and Microsoft working towards the mutual goal of accelerating customer success with Ajax.

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