A look at LionShare
The major influence for the LionShare project was the Visual Image User Study (VIUS) that was completed last September. LionShare came from a proof-of-concept prototype developed during work on VIUS. The project now has a $1.1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop LionShare 1.0. The grant started last year on October 1, and the team plans to have the 1.0 release ready by September 30, 2005. The first public release alpha went live at the end of September.
LionShare differs from traditional P2P networks in a number of ways. First and foremost, LionShare is designed to be a private, secure network. LionShare users will communicate with "PeerServers" to provide file sharing even when users are not online and for centralized management. The PeerServers will allow users to make files available to others authorized to retrieve the files, or even just as a backup of local files they wish to have available from multiple locations. Morr did note that the software will feature user quotas, to ensure that users do not abuse the backup features.
The software will also feature collaboration tools, such as P2P chat, not present in some file sharing utilities. Authentication will not be required for a user to search the network, but authentication will be necessary to actually retrieve or share files. The LionShare white paper also calls for the LionShare client to provide organizational features as well as search and retrieval capability already present in clients like LimeWire. The LionShare will allow users to search their own filesystems, though Morr pointed out that LionShare's organizational features are not as comprehensive as tools like Beagle or Apple's SpotLight.
At this point, however, LionShare's codebase is still in an alpha state. Morr said that the current alpha that's available on the website is missing the security components that will set LionShare apart from other P2P networks. Metzger noted that the next release should have the security integration, though the release will still be an alpha release.
LionShare is based on the LimeWire 4.0
codebase using a modified Gnutella protocol, and is entirely written in
Java. The client and server software are available under the GNU General
Public License, while the SASL-CA software is under a BSD-type
license. At this point, the LionShare team said that there are "
Since the LionShare source code is available, how will the developers
ensure that others aren't able to utilize the source to build anonymous
LionShare client software? According to Morr, it wouldn't matter if someone
were to tamper with the client software. "
In addition to requiring authentication, LionShare is designed to allow
file restriction based on identity or user roles. Users will be able to set
Access Control Lists (ACLs) to restrict sharing of a file to individual
users, groups or to all authenticated members. Morr said that the
attributes will come from the authentication servers, so that the
institutions running LionShare servers will be able to fine-tune the
criteria for file sharing. One potential hurdle for educational
institutions looking to join a LionShare network is the lack of a
standardized schema for ACLs. Morr acknowledged that each institution was
likely to have its own schema at the moment, that wouldn't be compatible
with other institutions. However, a standardized LDAP schema for higher
education called eduPerson
is being developed by Internet2, a partner organization for LionShare.
Morr also pointed out that LionShare was designed to allow users to
authenticate against a number of different sources. He said that the
project was doing a lot of work to make LionShare work with "
We also asked whether LionShare would protect authorized users from
accidentally sharing sensitive or personal files with the wrong set of
users. For example, could LionShare prevent a user from accidentally
sharing all of their files with all authenticated LionShare users? The
LionShare developers said that they had thought about this, and would try
to solve the problem with by having "
Whether LionShare will catch on beyond the academic setting is anyone's
guess. There are valid reasons for integrating authentication into P2P for
academic or business uses, but that approach will become unwieldy for
larger P2P uses such as downloading Linux ISOs. We'll be watching the
development of LionShare with interest, and are looking forward to further
releases to evaluate how useful the project will be in the long run.some
discussions here and there
" between the LionShare developers and the
LimeWire developers, but not a "concrete, everyday
partnership
", but that the LimeWire developers are pleased to see
their codebase being used in other projects.
In order to get any kind of
public file, you have to certify or authenticate...the other end wouldn't
authorize you to access the file.
"
whatever
authentication you have
", including LDAP directories and Kerberos
sources. Morr said that LionShare should be compatible with Microsoft's
Active Directory as well, though they haven't tested that as of yet.
a good UI
" that would let
users know that they were sharing files.
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