Network Security Services

Collection of cryptographic computer libraries

Network Security Services (NSS) is a collection of cryptographic computer libraries designed to support cross platform development of security enabled client and server applications with optional support for hardware TLS/SSL acceleration on the server side and hardware smart cards on the client side. NSS provides a complete open source implementation of cryptographic libraries supporting Transport Layer Security (TLS) / Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and S/MIME. NSS releases prior to version 3.14 are tri licensed under the Mozilla Public License 1.1, the GNU General Public License, and the GNU Lesser General Public License. Since release 3.14, NSS releases are licensed under GPL compatible Mozilla Public License 2.0.

NSS originated from the libraries developed when Netscape invented the SSL security protocol.

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 (NSPR), 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 (dynamic) 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.

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 (AES NI).

Network Security Services for Java (JSS) 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.