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curlentropy

Curl source for random entropy.

how do i configure to use /dev/random as the only source of ?
What i tried is. 

--with-random=/dev/random.

but still, when i do strace curl --help it shows me open of /dev/urandom.

Is there something i am missing?

Solution

  • It will depend on the TLS backend and library of choice.

    As OpenSSL is the most commonly used one, I'll presume you use that. When libcurl is built to use OpenSSL, libcurl itself will attempt to use the random file device that you told it to use at configure time, but I'm pretty sure that modern OpenSSL versions do their own entropy seeding - something that isn't and can't be controlled by the --with-random to curl's configure script.

    When libcurl is built to use any of the other TLS backends, they all do the random entropy seeding on their own so the random file that libcurl knows about will not be used at all.