On 02/25/2011 01:08 PM, Chris wrote:
The reason I thought it seemed unmaintained is because I was having a hard time finding an official page dedicated to the project.
Yes, that's a deficiency. The lack of a project page is part due the fact I'm the only person supporting the project and the difficulty of getting the right Mozilla mojo to maintain public pages. So I do apologize for that, it really should be done.
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.
I don't know what Firefox sync does or how it works. Some firefox folks hang out on this list, but it's not Firefox central :-) You might do better to go to a firefox specific list.
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.
You're right on one count, NSS and PKCS11 are large complicated systems. NSS actually comprises quite a bit more than PKCS11. PKCS11 is a standard promulgated by RSA for managing cryptographic tokens. NSS amongst other things provides API's which are compatible with the PKCS11 API's. NSS also implements support for the SSL/TLS protocols, certificate management, PKI infrastructure, and exposes API's which are the building blocks of those larger components.
Whether NSS can help you with your quest for solving your Firefox sync issue will be determined by what Firefox sync is doing and only the Firefox folks can tell you that. I suspect they already have tools to do what you want which would be a much shorter path than trying to build something on your own out of the NSS toolbox. Using NSS directly (even through Python) requires a fair amount of sophisticated knowledge to utilize NSS's building blocks to produce a comprehensive solution to some cryptographic problem.
HTH, John -- John Dennis <jden...@redhat.com> Looking to carve out IT costs? www.redhat.com/carveoutcosts/ -- dev-tech-crypto mailing list dev-tech-crypto@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-crypto
