The Sun-Netscape Alliance said it will kick start the use of digital certifications among ecommerce sites by giving away its public key infrastructure (PKI) library sourcecode.

The Alliance will hand over the sourcecode to mozilla.org, Netscape's opensource group, which will make it freely available to developers.

The contribution includes a version of Netscape Security Services (NSS) and Personal Security Manager (PSM). It follows last week's move by the US government to lift export restrictions of cryptographic sourcecodes.

Amy Millard, group product marketing manager of the Alliance's directory and security products, said the availability of the sourcecode will make it easier for developers to include security in their ecommerce applications because they will no longer have the arduous task of producing PKIs.

"This gives them access to a set of PKIs which have been ported to all the major operating systems," she said.

NSS provides secure sockets layer (SSL/TLS) and public key security capabilities while the PSM client hides the complexity of PKI for operations such as setting up an SSL connection, object signing and signature verification.