Package nss
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Package nss

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Introduction

This package provides a binding for the Network Security Services (NSS) library. Because NSS directly uses the Netscape Portable Runtime (NSPR) the binding also provides support for NSPR. There is an inherent conflict between NSPR and Python, please see the Issues section for more detail.

General documentation on NSS can be found here:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss

General documentation on NSPR can be found here:

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/NSPR_API_Reference

Please note, the documentation included with this package already encapsultes most of the information at the above two URL's, but is specific to the python binding of NSS/NSPR. It is suggested you refer to the python-nss documentation.

Most of the names and symbols in the NSS/NSPR C API have been kept in the nss-python binding and should be instantly familar or recognizable. Python has different naming conventions and the nss-python binding has adhered to the python naming convensions, Classes are camel case, otherwise symbols are all lower case with words seperated by underscores. The constants used by NSS/NSPR in C API have been imported literally to add the programmer who might be referring to the Mozilla NSS/NSPR documentation and/or header files or who is porting an existing C application to python. Minor other changes have been made in the interest of being "Pythonic".

Deprecated Functionality

Some elements of the binding have been deprecated because of lessons learned along the way. The following emit deprecation warnings and should not be used, they will be removed in a subsequent release.

io.NetworkAddress()
NetworkAddress initialization from a string parameter only works for IPv4, use AddrInfo instead.
io.NetworkAddress.set\_from\_string()
NetworkAddress initialization from a string parameter only works for IPv4, use AddrInfo instead.
io.NetworkAddress.hostentry
HostEntry objects only support IPv4, this property will be removed, use AddrInfo instead.
io.HostEntry.get\_network\_addresses()
Use iteration instead (e.g. for net_adder in hostentry), the port parameter is not respected, port will be value when HostEntry object was created.
io.HostEntry.get\_network\_address()
Use indexing instead (e.g. hostentry[i]), the port parameter is not respected, port will be value when HostEntry object was created.
io.Socket() and ssl.SSLSocket() without explicit family parameter
Socket initialization will require the family parameter in the future. The default family parameter of PR_AF_INET is deprecated because when iterating through NetworkAddress objects returned by AddrInfo some address may be an IPv6 address. Suggest using the family property of the NetworkAddress object associated with the socket, e.g. Socket(net_addr.family)

Getting Started

NSS stores it's certificates and private keys in a security database unlike OpenSSL which references it's certificates and keys via file pathnames. This means unless you already have an NSS Certificate Database (CertDB) the first order of business will be to create one. When a NSS application initializes itself it will need to specify the path to the CertDB (see "Things All NSS programs must do").

The CertDB is created and manipulated by the command line utilities certutil and modutil. Both of these programs are part of the nss-tools RPM. Documentation for these tools can be found here: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/tools

Here is an example of creating a CertDB and populating it. In the example the CertDB will be created under the directory "./pki", the CA will be called "myca", the database password will be "myca", and the server's hostname will be "myhost.example.com".

  1. Create the database:

    certutil -N -d ./pki
    

    This creates a new database under the directory ./pki

  2. Create a root CA certificate:

    certutil -d ./pki -S -s "CN=myca" -n myca -x -t "CTu,C,C" -m 1
    

    This creates an individual certificate and adds it to the certificate database with a subject of "CN=myca", a nickname of "myca", trust flags indicating for SSL indicating it can issue server certificates (C), can issue client certificates (T), and the certificate can be used for authentication and signing (u). For email and object signing it's trusted to create server certificates. The certificate serial number is set to 1.

  3. Create a server certificate and sign it. Our example server will use this:

    certutil -d pki -S -c myca -s "CN=myhost.example.com" -n myhost -t "u,u,u" -m 2
    

    This creates an individual certificate issued by the CA "myca" and adds it to the certificate database with a subject of "CN=myhost.example.com", a nickname of "myhost". The certificate serial number is set to 2.

  4. Import public root CA's:

    modutil -add ca_certs -libfile /usr/lib/libnssckbi.so -dbdir ./pki
    

    This is necessary to verify certificates presented by a SSL server a NSS client might connect to. When verifying a certificate the NSS library will "walk the certificate chain" back to a root CA which must be trusted. This command imports the well known root CA's as a PKCS #11 module.

Things All NSS programs must do

Examples

There are example programs in under "examples" in the documentation directory. On Fedora/RHEL/CentOS systems this will be /usr/share/doc/python-nss.

The ssl_example.py sample implements both a client and server in one script. You tell it whether to run as a client (-C) or a server (-S) when you invoke it. The sample shows many of the NSS/NSPR calls and fully implements basic non-SSL client/server using NSPR, SSL client/server using NSS, certificate validation, CertDB operations, and client authentication using certificates.

To get a list of command line options:

ssl_example.py --help

Using the above example certificate database server can be run like this:

ssl_example.py -S -c ./pki -n myhost

The client can be run like this:

ssl_example.py -C -c ./pki

Issues

FAQ

To be added


Version: 1.0.0

Submodules [hide private]
  • nss.error: This module defines the NSPR errors and provides functions to manipulate them.
  • nss.io: This module implements the NSPR IO functions
  • nss.nss: This module implements the NSS functions
  • nss.ssl: This module implements the SSL functionality in NSS

Variables [hide private]
  __package__ = None