Modern computers are extraordinary at a huge number of tasks... but choosing a random number is not one of their strong points. Many security programs ask the user for a bit of chaos to generate passwords or encryption keys (spontaneous mouse movements or pressing several keys at once), however, when it comes to protecting Web traffic, an extra step is needed, and in the case of Cloudflare, it gets its “randomness” by filming a wall covered with lava lamps. Who said cryptography can't have style...?
I imagine many of our readers have come across an extra verification ( “One More Step...”) before accessing a site. That is none other than Cloudflare, one of the leading names in security, CDN, and attack mitigation. Cloudflare provides DNS services to more than six million portals and has clients like Uber, but it also suffered a hard blow last February, courtesy of the CloudBleed vulnerability. Fortunately, CloudBleed was contained in time, and Cloudflare's systems today protect (on average) 10 percent of the Web. The volume of traffic is gigantic, and that requires the generation of random numbers to implement robust encryption. Where does Cloudflare get those numbers? From lava lamps.
That's right: The decoration that took the '60s by storm now works as a source of random numbers. What Cloudflare did was cover a wall with a total of one hundred lamps and install cameras to capture both images and video, converting both into a stream of virtually unpredictable bytes, which in turn serves as the basis for creating cryptographic keys. Honestly, the process makes a lot of sense: The wax bubbles are not the only thing that changes in the lamps. Ambient light, reflections, the tone of colors... all of that contributes to the “noise” Cloudflare wants.
Of course, this is not the only source of “randomness” Cloudflare uses. Its London offices film a three-piece pendulum, while in Singapore they adopted a Geiger counter pointing to a small sample of uranium. To close, a small detail: Cloudflare is creative in its solutions, but not necessarily original. The use of lava lamps was patented by none other than Silicon Graphics under the name Lavarand in 1996.
