Patent Application
20140047564
Electronic devices, such as tablet computers or smart-phones, may be used for both personal and work activities. It may be useful to protect work data, which may be confidential or proprietary, from being mixed with personal data.
It may be useful for some data, such as contact records, to be accessible from within multiple operation perimeters. In particular, it would be useful to provide a way to effectively and securely manage the creation, retrieval, or modification of contact records in an electronic device with multiple operation perimeters.
Example embodiments of the present disclosure will be described below with reference to the included drawings such that like reference numerals refer to like elements and in which:
For simplicity and clarity of illustration, reference numerals may be repeated among the figures to indicate corresponding or analogous elements. Numerous details are set forth to provide an understanding of the illustrative example embodiments described herein. The example embodiments may be practiced without these details. In other instances, well-known methods, procedures, and components have not been described in detail to avoid obscuring the disclosed example embodiments. The description is not to be considered as limited to the scope of the example embodiments shown and described herein.
One example way to protect data is for the operating system of an electronic device to implement ‘operation perimeters’, which define environments, spaces or domains within which some data are accessible while others are not. When operating within one operational perimeter, access to data outside of the perimeter is controlled. In particular, leakage of data across an operation perimeter may be prevented.
One example aspect of the disclosure relates to the creation and storage of contact records on an electronic device, where the electronic device provides protected resources only accessible from within a controlled operation perimeter. The electronic device may be, for example, a tablet computer, smart-phone, personal computer, laptop computer, handheld device, PDA, pager or other processor-based device.
The processor 104 is controlled by instructions stored in memory 122. These include operating system instructions 124 and application instructions 126. The memory also stores data 128. The memory may be a persistent memory, such as flash memory. Non-persistent memory, such as random access memory (RAM) may also be included.
In addition to the memory 122 and the transceiver 106, the electronic device has additional peripheral resources 120, which may include, for example, a display and user interface 130 (which may be a touch sensitive display, for example), audio I/O 132 (such as loudspeaker, headphone output and microphone), a camera 134 (for example, still image and video capture), general data I/O ports 136, a short range communication sub-system 138, a Global Position System (GPS) sub-system 140 and other sub-systems 142 (which may include an integrated keyboard and/or removable media, for example).
Operation of the processor 104 is controlled by the operating system 124. In accordance with an example aspect of the disclosure, the operating system implements one or more operation perimeters that control access to the transceiver 106, peripheral resources 120, and memory 122. When operating within one perimeter, access to device resources outside of the perimeter is controlled. For example, data security is provided by controlling access to storage resources outside of the perimeter. In particular, leakage of data across a perimeter may be prevented. In addition, some software applications may not be accessible from within all perimeters. An operation perimeter may be implemented using software modules (such as operating system 124), hardware modules, or a combination thereof, that work together to perform operations on the electronic device.
Work data, which is only accessible from within the work perimeter 204, may include documents, designs, numerical data, contacts, email messages, calendar entries. To help protect work data, the electronic device 100 creates the work perimeter 204 in its operating system to isolate work data, work applications and other work resources from personal data, personal applications and other personal resources. Work data may be encrypted for additional security.
Access to the interior of the work perimeter 204 is controlled by an authorization process, such as password validation. At initialization of the electronic device, the electronic device is operated within the personal perimeter 202 (or the perimeter having the lowest level of protection) and the work perimeter is ‘locked’, meaning that access to the work perimeter is not permitted without authorization. Personal application launcher 220 may be used to start personal applications 218 that have access to the personal resources 210. If a user wishes to access work applications, the work application launcher 216 may be accessed by ‘unlocking’ the work perimeter, as indicated by arrow 221. Access may be requested, for example, through user interaction with a user interface. Authorization may be achieved by validating a password entered by the user, or by some other authorization (such as biometric data input or gesture recognition etc.). Once inside the work perimeter 204, work applications 214 may be launched having access to the protected resources 206. Optionally, the resources 210 may be accessed, as indicated by arrow 223, but only to retrieve information. Operation may be returned to the personal perimeter by locking the work perimeter as indicated by arrow 222. Locking may be initiated by the user or may occur automatically—such as after a set period of inactivity or a set time since the perimeter was unlocked.
In some example embodiments, it is useful for some applications, resources and/or data to be accessible from within more than one perimeter. An application accessible from within more than one perimeter is termed a shared or hybrid application. An example of a shared application is a contact manager application. Some contact information may need to be protected, while other contact information does not. In
To prevent data leakage from the protected resources to the personal resources, application data is stored in protected resources when the shared application 224 is operated in the unlocked mode 228. Thus, no protected data is available to the application when it returns to the locked mode 226.
An example of a shared application is a contact manager. A contact manager may be launched by user interaction with a user interface, or by another application. For example, an email program may launch a contact manager to enable selection of an email address from a director of email addresses. The contact may be accessible from within more than one perimeter. A contact manager may be used to search a database of contact records, to add new contact records or edit existing contact records.
Contact information, in the form of contact records, may be stored within one more perimeters. Contact information includes, for example, information such as names, aliases, email addresses, work and home addresses, telephone numbers, fax numbers, instant messaging (IM) addresses and web addresses of contacts. Contact information may be stored in a single record or in multiple linked records. Linked records may have one or more common data fields or a common index. In particular, different parts of a contact record may be stored within different perimeters.
In accordance with one example aspect of the disclosure, when creating a contact record from within one operation perimeter, an option is provided by a contact manager (via a user interface) to save the contact record in a storage resource accessible from within the current operating perimeter or in a storage resource accessible from within an alternative operation perimeter. If the alternative operation perimeter has a higher security level than the current operation perimeter, a password or other authorization may be required.
When operating within the work perimeter, as depicted by block 308, the shared application may access work resources within the work perimeter, as depicted by block 318. Optionally, the shared application may also retrieve information from resources within the personal perimeter. The shared application may switch to a locked mode of operation, within the personal perimeter, as depicted by the positive branch from decision block 320. This switch may be requested by the user or may be caused automatically when a set criterion is satisfied. For example, the switch may occur once an application has been inactive for a set time. Prior to an automatic switch, the user may be prompted to enter an authorization to remain in the unlocked mode of operation. If the authorization is validated, or if no switch is has been requested, operation continues in the unlocked mode as depicted by the negative branch from decision block 320. If the shared application has been terminated, as depicted by the positive branch from decision block 322, the method terminates at block 324. Otherwise, as depicted by the negative branch from decision block 322, flow continues to block 308 and the shared application continues to operate in the unlocked mode within the work perimeter. In this way, a shared application may be moved between a work mode and a personal mode.
The protected resource may be, for example, a storage resource such as a local or remote memory, or a protected communication resource, such as a network connection. For example, the contact record may be stored in a storage resource of the second operation perimeter if the authorization is valid for the second operation perimeter.
Once the authorization is validated for the second operation perimeter at block 414, the electronic device may be operated within the second operation perimeter.
If the contact information is received from a user of the electronic device, the user may be prompted to select an operation perimeter of a storage resource in which the contact record is to be stored.
Multiple operation perimeters may be implemented, each having an associated authorization. The operation perimeters may have a flat structure or a hierarchical structure.
If the contact record is to be passed to a protected resource of the second operation perimeter and a set time has elapsed since the contact information was received, the authorization may be requested and validated again before the contact record is passed to the protected resource.
In one example embodiment, the contact information is received as an electronic business card, such as a ‘vCard’. An electronic business card may be received as an attachment to an email or via another file transfer mechanism. For example, an electronic business card could be downloaded from an Internet web site. When an electronic business card is received, the user is presented with a choice of saving the contact information into the work perimeter or the personal perimeter. If the electronic device is operating within the work perimeter when the electronic business card is received, an authorization may be required before the contact record created from the card's contact information can be saved into the work perimeter.
In a further example embodiment, part of the contact record is stored in a personal resource within the personal perimeter and part of the contact record is stored in a protected resource within the work perimeter. In this example embodiment, access to the protect resource is only granted once a requested authorization has been validated. For example, a colleague's name and home telephone number may be stored in a personal resource, while their work contact information may be stored in the protected resource. A common field or index may be used to link the two parts on of the contact record.
The implementations of the present disclosure described above are intended to be merely examples. It will be appreciated by those of skill in the art that alterations, modifications and variations to the illustrative example embodiments disclosed herein may be made without departing from the scope of the present disclosure. Moreover, selected features from one or more of the above-described example embodiments may be combined to create alternative example embodiments not explicitly shown and described herein.
It will be appreciated that any module or component disclosed herein that executes instructions may include or otherwise have access to non-transient and tangible computer readable media such as storage media, computer storage media, or data storage devices (removable or non-removable) such as, for example, magnetic disks, optical disks, or tape data storage. Computer storage media may include volatile and non-volatile, removable and non-removable media implemented in any method or technology for storage of information, such as computer readable instructions, data structures, program modules, or other data. Examples of computer storage media include RAM, ROM, EEPROM, flash memory or other memory technology, CD-ROM, digital versatile disks (DVD) or other optical storage, magnetic cassettes, magnetic tape, magnetic disk storage or other magnetic storage devices, or any other medium which can be used to store the desired information and which can be accessed by an application, module, or both. Any such computer storage media may be part of the server, any component of or related to the network, backend, etc., or accessible or connectable thereto. Any application or module herein described may be implemented using computer readable/executable instructions that may be stored or otherwise held by such computer readable media.
The implementations of the present disclosure described above are intended to be merely example. It will be appreciated by those of skill in the art that alterations, modifications and variations to the illustrative example embodiments disclosed herein may be made without departing from the scope of the present disclosure. Moreover, selected features from one or more of the above-described example embodiments may be combined to create alternative example embodiments not explicitly shown and described herein.
The present disclosure may be embodied in other specific forms without departing from its spirit or essential characteristics. The described example embodiments are to be considered in all respects only as illustrative and not restrictive. The scope of the disclosure is, therefore, indicated by the appended claims rather than by the foregoing description. All changes that come within the meaning and range of equivalency of the claims are to be embraced within their scope.
| Filing Document | Filing Date | Country | Kind | 371c Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PCT/US2012/050318 | 8/10/2012 | WO | 00 | 12/17/2012 |
