Why replace NSS with wolfSSL in Firefox?

Here at wolfSSL, we love doing integrations.

What you might not know about Mozilla’s Firefox and NSS is that all of the cryptography happens underneath their PKCS#11 layer which is a software component called the “NSS Internal PKCS #11 Module”. It has a “Software Security Device.” As you can see in the user interface screenshot above, “wolfPKCS11” has “wolfSSL HSM slot ID 01” and has been loaded in Mozilla Firefox’s Security Device Manager. You can find wolfPKCS11 at https://github.com/wolfSSL/wolfPKCS11/ . It primarily replaces the underlying authentication implementations with those found in wolfCrypt.

What does this mean in terms of FIPS 140-2/3? It means that if you are running Firefox in an environment that requires FIPS assurances, you can swap in wolfSSL and meet the requirement!