Linux distros consolidate crypto libs

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

For a while already, the Fedora distribution has fought battles, done lots of work and pushed for a consolidation of all packages that use crypto libs to completely go with Mozilla’s NSS.

Now it seems to be OpenSUSE’s turn. The discussion I link to here doesn’t make any definite conclusions but they seem to lean towards NSS as well, claiming it has the most features. I wonder what they base that statement on – if there’s a public doc anywhere that state exactly which has what that makes any contender better than any other for them?

In the Fedora case it seems they’ve focused on the NSS FIPS license as the deciding factor but the license issue is also often brought up in this discussion.

I’ve personally been pondering on writing some kind of unified crypto layer that would expose a single API to an application and handle the different libs as backends, pretty much the same way we do it internally in libcurl at the moment. It hasn’t taken off (or even been started) since I’ve not had the time nor energy for it yet.

Posted in Linux, Security, cURL and libcurl | Comments Off

curl with NSS and Fedora

Sunday, January 20th, 2008

Dave Jones blogged about his recent problems with curl on Fedora 8. It seems to be a problem somewhere in or related to the NSS library, that Fedora links curl to for SSL/TLS these days.cURL

What I find a bit annoying with this situation, is that I’m using Debian unstable and I’m dist-upgrading fairly frequently to be able to run on the bleeding edge and yet I don’t have the equivalent NSS version Fedora has and what’s perhaps worse is: I don’t even know how to get it and build my own local version! Is Fedora using their own patched version of this (rhetorical question as I’m quite sure they are)? Is it possible to get that version or patch so that I can build it and test on my non- Fedora development machine(s) ?

So, even though it really isn’t my problem or my issue to deal with, I couldn’t even try out his problem on my own!

Posted in Linux, cURL and libcurl | 3 Comments »