Lobber is a data distribution service based on BitTorrent technology and federated authentication and authorization. Lobber consists of a few collaborating parts:

• The Lobber web application
• A messaging and notification mechanism
• Lobber clients (aka "storage nodes")
• Regular BitTorrent clients

One of the design goals of Lobber has been to do as little damage to the BitTorrent protocol as possible, thereby enabling as many regular BitTorrent clients to work unmodified. Instead Lobber implements a modified tracker and torrent registry in order to achieve the following goals:

• Enable a user to securely share a dataset with other users.
• It must be possible to limit access to datasets based on user-defined groups.
• It must be possible to use a normal BitTorrent client both for sharing and for downloading datasets.
• An API is needed for integration with other systems