Hi all, I just wrote a program using OpenSSL crypto library (version 0.9.7b). Everything works fine. But I have concerns about whether I should seed the PRNG and exactly how to do that.
In my program, I have calls to RSA_generate_key and also RAND_bytes which is used to generate a DES key. It's obvious that these functions require source of randomness, and in the documentation it also said to seed the PRNG before calling them. However, because I couldn't figure out exactly what to use to do the seed, I simply called them without doing any seeding for now. When I run the program, nothing seems to be wrong (i.e. RAND_bytes() returns 1, etc.) So does this mean I do not need to explicitly do the seed? I remember the FAQ mentions about some default places where OpenSSL will look for source of randomness. So in this case, does that mean it found the source to use? My program works on both Windows and Linux right now, but can I assume it will always be able to find the source? If I still should seed the PRNG, could someone explain to me how to actually do it? I know I can use RAND_seed, but I don't know what to pass to RAND_seed in the buf parameter. The documentation mentions source of randomness can come from mouse clicks or things like that, but I have no clue how that works. So I'm confused... Please clarify this for me. Thank you very much! Michelle ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org User Support Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Automated List Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED]
