For an application to use this interface, it must connect to the AF_UNIX stream socket that is provided by the NSS server for this interface. The socket path name is /var/sock/nss. Either the Language Environment® C/C++ API or the UNIX System Services BPX services can be used to create AF_UNIX sockets and connect to this service.

When an application connects to the socket, the server sends an initialization message to the client application. When the NSS server closes a client connection (reasons for doing so include severe errors in the format of data requests sent by the application to the server, or NSS server termination), the NSS server attempts to send a termination message to the client before closing the connection. Both the initialization and termination messages match those used by the IKE daemon (see IPSec NMI request/response format).