p2p security question

[delraysol]

Hello all, I am new to the forum and hoping to learn a thing or two.

I am student doing research on p2p and its various applications/capabilities. I have little to no understanding of p2p in practice. If I were to subsrcibe to a platform such as limewire or fileswire what type of security would I need? Does having either of those programs running on my browser make any file on my computer accessible through file sharing?

Im running mac os x

Thanks, delraysol