M2Crypto provides EC support for ECDSA/ECDH. I have installed OpenSSL 0.9.8i which contains support for EC. However when I run "from M2Crypto import EC,BIO" I get error saying EC_init() failed. So I added debug to print m2.OPENSSL_VERSION_TEXT value. It gets printed as "OpenSSL 0.9.7 19 Feb 2003". This version of OpenSSL doesnot support EC. 
I tried "python setup.py build build_ext --openssl="new_path where OpenSSL 0.9.8i is installed". Though M2Crypto is built again "Python setup.py install" , I still see that it points to "Old version of OpenSSL". 
Any Pointers on how to successfully get M2Crypto to use 0.9.8i will be useful.
Possibly its looking up shared libs libssl.so and libcrypto.so and finding the old ones in /usr/lib if you add the new_path to the top of /etc/ld.so.conf so it gets searched first it would work. But this might break other OpenSSL applications expecting old OpenSSL.
Python M2Crypto EC Support