Entropy - really - this library should not do this. OpenSSL's attempt to be a random subsystem resulted in all sorts of horrors: EGD considered harmful - really, userland has no business in this. Library can decide "Oh Noes, We need something random..." and then: Your RSA Private key is pretty random char seed[] = "String to Give the Random Number Generator Randomness"; getpid(); gettimeofday(); Since many of these were always "there" - these become an attack target - modify the word to enable them and you have predictable key generation.