The NSS software crypto module has been validated five times for conformance to FIPS 140 at Security Levels 1 and 2. NSS was the first open source cryptographic library to receive FIPS 140 validation. The NSS libraries passed the NISCC TLS/SSL and S/MIME test suites.
Applications that use NSS
, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems/Oracle Corporation, Google and other companies and individual contributors have co-developed NSS. Mozilla provides the source code repository, bug tracking system, and infrastructure for mailing lists and discussion groups. They and others named below use NSS in a variety of products, including the following:
Libreswan IKE/IPsec requires NSS. It is a fork of Openswan which could optionally use NSS.
Architecture
NSS includes a framework to which developers and OEMs can contribute patches, such as assembly code, to optimize performance on their platforms. Mozilla has certified NSS 3.x on 18 platforms. NSS makes use of Netscape Portable Runtime, a platform-neutral open-source API for system functions designed to facilitate cross-platform development. Like NSS, NSPR has been used heavily in multiple products.
In addition to libraries and APIs, NSS provides security tools required for debugging, diagnostics, certificate and key management, cryptography-module management, and other development tasks. NSS comes with an extensive and growing set of documentation, including introductory material, API references, man pages for command-line tools, and sample code. Programmers can utilize NSS as source and as shared libraries. Every NSS release is backward-compatible with previous releases, allowing NSS users to upgrade to new NSS shared libraries without recompiling or relinking their applications.
Interoperability and open standards
NSS supports a range of security standards, including the following:
TLS 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3. The Transport Layer Security protocol from the IETF supersedes SSL v3.0 while remaining backward-compatible with SSL v3 implementations.
SSL 3.0. The Secure Sockets Layer protocol allows mutual authentication between a client and server and the establishment of an authenticated and encrypted connection.
* PKCS #1. RSA standard that governs implementation of public-key cryptography based on the RSA algorithm.
* PKCS #3. RSA standard that governs implementation of Diffie–Hellman key agreement.
* PKCS #5. RSA standard that governs password-based cryptography, for example to encrypt private keys for storage.
* PKCS #7. RSA standard that governs the application of cryptography to data, for example digital signatures and digital envelopes.
* PKCS #8. RSA standard that governs the storage and encryption of private keys.
* PKCS #9. RSA standard that governs selected attribute types, including those used with PKCS #7, PKCS #8, and PKCS #10.
* PKCS #10. RSA standard that governs the syntax for certificate requests.
* PKCS #11. RSA standard that governs communication with cryptographic tokens and permits application independence from specific algorithms and implementations.
* PKCS #12. RSA standard that governs the format used to store or transport private keys, certificates, and other secret material.
Cryptographic Message Syntax, used in S/MIME. IETF message specification that provides a consistent way to send and receive signed and encrypted MIME data.
X.509 v3. ITU standard that governs the format of certificates used for authentication in public-key cryptography.
PKIX Certificate and CRL Profile. The first part of the four-part standard under development by the Public-Key Infrastructure working group of the IETF for a public-key infrastructure for the Internet.
NSS supports the PKCS #11 interface for access to cryptographic hardware like TLS/SSL accelerators, hardware security modules and smart cards. Since most hardware vendors such as SafeNet, AEP and Thales also support this interface, NSS-enabled applications can work with high-speed crypto hardware and use private keys residing on various smart cards, if vendors provide the necessary middleware. NSS version 3.13 and above support the Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions.
Network Security Services for Java consists of a Java interface to NSS. It supports most of the security standards and encryption technologies supported by NSS. JSS also provides a pure Java interface for ASN.1 types and BER/DER encoding.
