Marc-Andre Lemburg added the comment: neologix:
According to man rand(3ssl), OpenSSL uses an internal state of 1023 bytes for the RNG. You only see it reading 32 bytes from /dev/urandom in the strace because it has already loaded 1024 bytes from the RNG state file ~/.rng before adding another 32 bytes: open("/home/lemburg/.rnd", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "..."..., 4096) = 1024 read(3, "", 4096) = 0 Generating RSA private key, 512 bit long modulus open("/dev/urandom", O_RDONLY|O_NOCTTY|O_NONBLOCK) = 3 read(3, "...", 32) = 32 FWIW: I'm with Raymond and Tim on this one. I prefer to have a good seed in an RNG per default, simply because most application don't bother to reseed RNGs every now and then, so having a good start into the day is important :-) ---------- nosy: +lemburg _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue21470> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com