Network Security Services (NSS) is a collection of cryptographic computer libraries designed to support cross-platform development of security-enabled client and server applications with optional support for hardware TLS/SSL acceleration on the server side and hardware smart cards on the client side. NSS provides a complete open-source implementation of cryptographic libraries supporting Transport Layer Security (TLS) / Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and S/MIME. NSS releases prior to version 3.14 are tri-licensed under the Mozilla Public License 1.1, the GNU General Public License, and the GNU Lesser General Public License. Since release 3.14, NSS releases are licensed under GPL-compatible Mozilla Public License 2.0. History NSS originated from the libraries developed when Netscape invented the SSL security protocol. FIPS 140 validation and NISCC testing The NSS software crypto module has been validated five times (in 1997, 1999, 2002, 2007, and 2010) for conformance to FIPS 140 at Security Levels 1 and 2. NSS was the first open source cryptographic library to receive FIPS 140 validation. The NSS libraries passed the NISCC TLS/SSL and S/MIME test suites (1.6 million test cases of invalid input data). Applications that use NSS AOL, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems/Oracle Corporation, Google and other companies and individual contributors have co-developed NSS. Mozilla provides the source code repository, bug tracking system, and infrastructure for mailing lists and discussion groups. They and others named below use NSS in a variety of products, including the following: Mozilla client products, including Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, and Firefox for mobile. AOL Communicator and AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) Open source client applications such as Evolution, Pidgin, and OpenOffice.org 2.0 onward (and its descendants). Server products from Red Hat: Red Hat Directory Server, Red Hat Certificate System, and the mod nss SSL module for the Apache web server. Sun server products from the Sun Java Enterprise System, including Sun Java System Web Server, Sun Java System Directory Server, Sun Java System Portal Server, Sun Java System Messaging Server, and Sun Java System Application Server, open source version of Directory Server OpenDS. Libreswan IKE/IPsec requires NSS. It is a fork of Openswan which could optionally use NSS. Architecture NSS includes a framework to which developers and OEMs can contribute patches, such as assembly code, to optimize performance on their platforms. Mozilla has certified NSS 3.x on 18 platforms. NSS makes use of Netscape Portable Runtime (NSPR), a platform-neutral open-source API for system functions designed to facilitate cross-platform development. Like