: Trust cannot be uniform across wide-area networks. There are regions of local trust. Within a region of trust, there can be a set of software components (object managers) that are mutually trusting for the purposes of object sharing, but more global trust models should also be supported. This paper describes such a model and proposes a protocol that exploits local trust to achieve high performance even when objects can migrate between trust domains. Introduction Islands of trust arise in the Internet because trust in computer systems and their software is largely based on confidence in the local administrators of systems and their managers. Each such region of local trust often corresponds to a corporate Intranet. Cooperative working and object sharing extends across the boundaries of local trust domains, for example when several companies collaborate in an engineering or construction project. This corresponds to the 'virtual enterprise' model for cooperation [BP95]. When this occu...