Couchbase open source data store goes mobile

Couchbase is launching a version of its namesake NoSQL open source data store that can run on mobile devices, called Couchbase Lite. 

It is also releasing companion products, Couchbase Sync Gateway, which synchronizes data between a mobile device and a cloud service, and Couchbase Cloud, an online sandbox for developers to try Couchbase Lite. 

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Developers could use Couchbase Lite to store data for their mobile applications, and use Couchbase Sync Gateway to synchronize the data with back-end supporting services, the company suggests.

Couchbase is a key/value document store that sends and receives data through the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), a protocol for exchanging information between two systems that is fairly easy for developers to understand and work with.

JSON is particularly useful for applications that periodically send and receive a lot of data, according to the company. 

Companies such as McGraw-Hill, Orbitz, LinkedIn, and the Amadeus travel booking service all have used Couchbase.  

Currently, there are about 2.3 million mobile application developers worldwide -- about 12.6 percent of all developers--and by 2016, that number will double to almost 5 million mobile app developers, predicted analyst firm Vision Mobile. 

Couchbase announced the new products at its annual user conference Friday in San Francisco.

Couchbase Lite and Couchbase Sync Gateway are available to download, for both Android and Apple iOS devices in beta form. 

The company has not announced when these products will be commercially available. Couchbase Cloud is available for immediate use.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com

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Salesforce realizes nobody wants to store their files in Salesforce

A year ago at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff dropped some big news: Salesforce was getting into file sharing, taking on competitors like Box with a new product called Chatterbox.

Turned out that wasn't really true. Chatterbox was an add-on feature to Chatter, Salesforce's news feed (think of it like Facebook for salespeople). It allowed users to place files from their local hard drives into the Chatter news stream so that other Salesforce users could read them on any device. But in conjunction with an earlier product called Chatter Files, which let Chatter users upload files for collaboration, it seemed like Salesforce was trying to get people to use Chatter to store and work on files, rather than relying on third-party repositories like Box.

Never mind.

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Today, Salesforce is killing the Chatterbox name and instead subsuming its functionality into a new feature called Salesforce Files. It's different from previous Salesforce file-sharing efforts in several critical ways:

It works with third-party file repositories, both on-premises (like SharePoint or Documentum) and cloud-based (like Dropbox or Box). To achieve this, Salesforce used technology it gained in the February 2013 acquisition of EntropySoft, which had built direct connectors to these repositories using their APIs. For repositories without direct APIs, Salesforce is relying on the CMIS standard.Files don't have to be stored in Salesforce. Instead, Salesforce will contain read-only links or pointers to files in other repositories. Access will be read-only -- a user will be able to see a PowerPoint presentation stored in SharePoint that her business partner has shared via Salesforce, but she won't be able to edit it unless she downloads it to her device and opens it in a third-party app (likeQuickOfficeon the iPhone, for instance).It doesn't require Chatter, but it will be available from within other Salesforce products.It will also be available to third-party applications built on the Salesforce Force platform.

The product enters beta today and will supposedly be out in February 2014, so there are still some areas that seem like they need a lot more fleshing out. In particular, Salesforce said Files would rely on permissions inherited from the other repositories -- for example, users who have permission to access a particular SharePoint folder will have permission to access that folder in Salesforce Files, too. But this seems to require Active Directory Federation Services, which is not trivial to set up; support for third-party identity brokers like Ping and Okta will come later on.

Salesforce Chatter executive vide president Nasi Jazayeri also told reporters that Files will eventually offer read-write access to files, but it wasn't clear which repositories would support this or what the timeline would be for this feature.

At any rate, the takeaway is that Salesforce no longer expects to be an alternate repository for files. Instead, it's going to work with the repositories you already have.

Benioff speaks at TechCrunch Disrupt again next week. We can't wait to see what he says this time.

Matt Rosoff is the editorial director of CITEworld. Read Matt's bio

This story was originally published at CITEworld.

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'Jekyll' test attack sneaks through Apple App Store, wreaks havoc on iOS

Acting like a software version of a Transformer robot, a malware test app sneaked through Apple's review process disguised as a harmless app, and then re-assembled itself into an aggressive attacker even while running inside the iOS "sandbox" designed to isolate apps and data from each other.

The app, dubbed Jekyll, was helped by Apple's review process. The malware designers, a research team from Georgia Institute of Technology's Information Security Center (GTISC), were able to monitor their app during the review: they discovered Apple ran the app for only a few seconds, before ultimately approving it. That wasn't anywhere near long enough to discover Jekyll's deceitful nature.

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The name is a reference to the 1886 novella by Robert Louis Stevenson, called "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde." The story is about the two personalities within Dr. Henry Jekyll: one good, but the other, which manifests as Edward Hyde, deeply evil. 

Jekyll's design involves more than simply hiding the offending code under legitimate behaviors. Jekyll was designed to later re-arrange its components to create new functions that couldn't have been detected by the app review. It also directed Apple's default Safari browser to reach out for new malware from specific Websites created for that purpose.

"Our research shows that despite running inside the iOS sandbox, a Jekyll-based app can successfully perform many malicious tasks, such as posting tweets, taking photos, sending email and SMS, and even attacking other apps all without the user's knowledge," says Tielei Wang, in a July 31 press release by Georgia Tech. Wang led the Jekyll development team at GTISC; also part of the team was Long Lu, a Stony Brook University security researcher.

Some blogs and technology sites picked up on the press release in early August. But wider awareness of Jekyll, and its implications, seems to have been sparked by an Aug. 15 online story in the MIT Technology Review, by Dave Talbot, who interviewed Long Lu for a more detailed account.

Jekyll "even provided a way to magnify its effects, because it could direct Safari, Apple's default browser, to a website with more malware," Talbot wrote.

A form of Trojan Horse malware, the recreated Jekyll, once downloaded, reaches out to the attack designers for instructions. "The app did a phone-home when it was installed, asking for commands," Lu explained. "This gave us the ability to generate new behavior of the logic of that app which was nonexistent when it was installed."

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