IBM says it’s found a way to make mashups secure enough for business.

Because of inherent browser insecurity, mashups aren’t really viable for widespread business adoption.

But what’s a little thing like viability compared to the pressure of keeping up with the Joneses – in this case the consumer mashup rage.

So to keep the enterprise from hurting itself – and being held hostage by some cyber crook – IBM has come up with SMash, which basically lets information from different sources talk to each other – and create the one unified view mashups are famous for – but keeps them isolated so it’s harder for malicious code to inject itself into the company system.

And it’s contributing the technology to the OpenAjax Alliance, that organization of vendors, open source projects and companies using AJAX dedicated to open, interoperable AJAX-based web technologies like Borland, the Dojo Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, Google, Mozilla, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, Yahoo, Zend and Zimbra.

Needless to say IBM was a founder.

IBM says the SMash keeps the code and data from each source separate while allowing controlled sharing of data through a secure communications channel.

It says performance evaluations have shown that SMash can be used in common enterprise mashup applications.

IBM intends to use SMash technology in its first commercial mashup maker, Lotus Mashups, due this summer and aimed at business. The contribution is bait.

A detailed description of SMash is scheduled for the World Wide Web Conference in Beijing next month.