python-nss is a Python binding for NSS (Network Security Services) and NSPR (Netscape Portable Runtime). NSS provides cryptography services supporting SSL, TLS, PKI, PKIX, X509, PKCS*, etc. NSS is an alternative to OpenSSL and used extensively by major software projects. NSS is FIPS-140 certified.
NSS is built upon NSPR because NSPR provides an abstraction of common operating system services, particularly in the areas of networking and process management. Python also provides an abstraction of common operating system services but because NSS and NSPR are tightly bound python-nss exposes elements of NSPR.
More information on python-nss can be found on the
python-nss project page <http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/python-nss>_
For information on NSS and NSPR, see the following:
- Network Security Services.
NSS project page <http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/>_. - Netscape Portable Runtime.
NSPR project page <http://www.mozilla.org/projects/nspr/>_.
To build python-nss you the C language header files and libraries for both NSPR and NSS will need to be installed. This is system and distribution specific, as such we cannot give you explicit instructions. On Linux typically these packages are called:
- nss-devel
- nspr-devel
Use your system package manger to install them, for example on Fedora:
sudo yum install nss-devel nspr-devel
After all packages are installed, then:
python setup.py build
sudo python setup.py install
To generate the API documentation:
python setup.py build_doc