Fujitsu developing HTML5 app platform for enterprise security

Engineers at Fujitsu Laboratories are developing anHTML5-based platform for smartphones that designed to keep corporate data secure when accessed from employee-owned handsets.The system, which Fujitsu plansto launch later this year, is one of a number that addresses this increasingly common problem: how to allow workersaccess to corporate IT systems while avoiding deliberate or inadvertent leaks of data from devices that are not totally under the company's control.[ Find out how to block the viruses, worms, and other malware that threaten your business, with hands-on advice from InfoWorld's expert contributors in InfoWorld's "Malware Deep Dive" PDF guide. | Don't look now, butyour antivirus may be killing your virtualization infrastructure. InfoWorld's Matt Prigge shows you how to detect the warning signs. ]Fujitsu's system matches an app on the phone with a cloud-based server that delivers corporate apps such as email, sales databases and customer contacts, as HTML5 applications.The phone app senses whether it's in the workplace or not and therefore whether it has accessto corporate data. The cloud apps are delivered over an encrypted connection to the handset, which runs them inside a secure application environment on the phone.As soon as the employee leaves the workplace, the cloudconnection is severed and the corporate apps are no longer accessible. And because they ran in the application environment, the phone doesn't contain any remnants of their use, such as cookies or temporary data files, said Kazuaki Nimura, a research manager at the smart platformlaboratory of Fujitsu Laboratories.At an event in Silicon Valley on Thursday, Nimura demonstrated the system running on both an iPhone and Android handset. Each mobile OS requires a native app to runthe execution environment, but the HTML5 cloud apps will run across all platforms.In the demonstration, access tothe corporate apps was enabled in the iPhone when it came within reach of a simulated company Wi-Fi signal, while the Android phone had the option of being switched on by either Wi-Fi detection or through a tap on an NFC (near field communication) card.As soon as the phones detectedthe network or NFC card, they switched to work mode, which brought up a new home screenwith different set of apps. While in work mode, access to personal apps could be determined by a company security policy, said Nimura.In the demonstration, work mode also disabled the phone'scamera.When the phone lost the network connection or tapped on the NFC card, it was returned to its conventional home screen and stricter corporate security policies were removed.The same system could also be used to deliver corporate apps to workers outside of the office, maintaining the securitypolicies in place for access and use of the data.Fujitsu hopes to release the technology as its Mobile Enterprise Application Platformlater this year.