M2Crypto For Linux

M2Crypto (also known as python-m2crypto) is an open source, freely distributed and platform-independent library software implemented in Python and designed from the ground up to act as the most complete wrapper for OpenSSL.

Key features include support for symmetric ciphers (including AES), DSA, RSA, DH, HMACs, EC, message digests, SSL functionality for implementing server and clients, AuthCookies powered by HMAC for web session management, HTTPS extensions to Python's urllib, as well as xmlrpclib and httplib libraries.

M2Crypto features TLS (Transport Layer Security) and FTP (File Transfer Protocol) server and client implementations, S/MIME support, ZServerSSL, ZSmime and SSL for Twisted, and support for Smartcards via the Engine interface.

Installing M2Crypto on your GNU/Linux system is an easy task. All you have to do is to download the latest version of the software from Softpedia or via its official website (see link at the end of the article), save the file on your computer, use your default archive manager to extract its contents and fire up your favorite terminal emulator software.

In the Terminal app, use the ‘cd’ command to navigate to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/M2Crypto-0.22.3) and type the ‘sudo python setup.py install’ command to install M2Crypto on your computer.

A quick look under the hood of M2Crypto, will show us that the library is written entirely in the Python programming language and it is supported on all operating systems where Python is available, such as GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

It is available for download only as a gzipped source archive, which contains the project’s source code and all the files you need to get started with the software (see the above section for details). Supported hardware architectures include 32-bit and 64-bit.