Trust is the cornerstone of sharing. It is a human trait established between individuals or organizations and lies outside of the technological solution. Technology merely serves to certify and verify trust relationships. The basis of trust is either direct reputation, between parties known to each other, or indirect, when the parties involved have a trust relationship with a mutually known third party.

If trust is not present, then cooperation and sharing are difficult to achieve. In short, trust is very closely allied with notions of security, authority to hold or to view content, and identification of users. To date, P2P systems for learning object exchange have had only rudimentary security features to address these concerns.
 
In order to create a legitimate and collaboration-friendly environment, the LionShare project has designed its security model based on the following design requirements:

•    Individuals should never be able to share files anonymously to prevent file-sharing abuses

•    Individuals should be able to search the LionShare network anonymously due to privacy concerns

•    File owners must have the ability to control who can access their files based on certain verifiable attributes. Files can be shared with specific individuals, or people possessing certain attributes (e.g. members of a department).

The LionShare security model is designed to prevent users from impersonating others on the network by stealing their private keys, by obtaining certificates or attributes of another user, or by generating fraudulent attributes. There will also be measures in place to prevent a protected file from being intercepted during transfer over the network.

The following sections briefly describe LionShare's processes for authentication, authorization, access control, and the use requirements that have been established concerning network security and privacy.