On Feb 25, 12:41 pm, John Dennis <jden...@redhat.com> wrote: > On 02/24/2011 02:39 PM, Chris wrote: > > > > > Hello, > > > Recently I was looking into the Firefox Sync utility. I setup my own > > customer server and got my web browser to successfully sync to my > > computer and then wanted to look at the database entries. Of course > > the data is encrypted which makes sense if I'm going to send my data > > to a public server, but in my case not necessary. I wanted to try to > > decrypt the information to see what it was storing in the database and > > so I've been researching how to do this. > > > I found references to a python package python-nss which is available > > in RPM format, but I'm using Debian and having trouble actually > > finding something pre-compiled. I downloaded the source code for the > > python-nss tool from > >http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/security/python-nss/releases/P.... > > > When I try to build this I'm getting compile erorr's and they seem to > > be caused by a missing definition for "NSSInitParameters". The > > reference to this name is in py_nss.h, but i can not actually find > > where it is defined in any of the included source code of any of the > > required libraries (searched all the code in nss3 and nspr4). Can > > anyone provide help on this. > > > Is this python-nss project actually being maintained? Seems like it > > may not be. > > python-nss is absolutely being maintained. In fact if you looked at the > timestamps on version 0.11 you would have seen that release is only a > couple days old. I am the maintainer. > > As for the compile errors, I suspect you might be using an old version > of NSS, what version do you have? > > If someone wants to package python-nss for Debian, I think that would be > fantastic (hint, it's not going to be me, I work for Red Hat who has > generously funded the entire development effort and we're obviously > Fedora and RPM based, not Debian and apt based) > > I would be happy to help you get it to build. My first suggestion would > be to see if you can find a more current version of NSS for debian. I > don't really understand debian packaging but it's my understanding there > are different channels for updates and you might have to look in the > right place. If no current versions of NSS are available the next option > would be to #ifdef parts of the binding depending on the version of NSS > which is available, but that's an effort I'd prefer to avoid at the > moment for a host of reasons. > > Hope that helps! > > John > > -- > John Dennis <jden...@redhat.com> > > Looking to carve out IT costs?www.redhat.com/carveoutcosts/
Thanks for the offer of help, I may take you up on it. You are right that the time stamp is recent on the download. I wasn't suggesting that there was any lack of quality in the project by asking if it was being maintained or not, but rather just concerned about its long term support. The reason I thought it seemed unmaintained is because I was having a hard time finding an official page dedicated to the project. I also was having a hard time downloading the RPM but I think I may have been connecting to the wrong server. I eventually (after posting my original message) did get an RPM downloaded and extracted out just the necessary files to drop it into my site- packages folder for python on my debian system and it seemed to work. Now I just need to find some examples or perhaps direct help on how I might decrypt the information stored in my FireFox Sync repository. Perhaps you can clear something up for me. The whole NSS and PKCS#11 seems to be a rather large and complicated system. Like I said I really just want to decrypt the data in my database. From what I found (looked at some javascript source code files for the FireFox Sync project) it looks like sync uses NSS to encrypt, but I'm not clear on how to determine what algorithm it uses. At first I thought maybe PKCS#11 was an algorithm, but I'm starting to thing it is just a container for algorithm's and so then I must ask what is actually being used. Maybe I don't need python-nss if the data is just being encrypted using some standard algorithm (wrapped up in NSS or PKCS#11) which python already has facilities to decode. As far as getting it to build on debian I will try to get a newer version of the nss library. You are correct in that the debian package system lets you specify "servers" much like the RPM system where it gets the packages from. I am currently pulling from the "stable" branch which may not be the most up-to-date version. I can pull a bleeding-edge version of the library and try to compile with it. As far as the compile in general goes I didn't really have many problems and I think once this issue is fixed it will work. The only thing I had to do was add symbolic links on my system from /usr/ include/nss3 -> /usr/include/nss and from /usr/include/nspr4 -> /usr/ include/nspr. This is obviously just a small difference in the way that the two package managers install those libraries. If I were to create a debian package for python-nss I could easily include this creation of the symbolic link to ease the building of python-nss so that there would not need to be any conditional logic in the build scripts. -- dev-tech-crypto mailing list dev-tech-crypto@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-crypto
