While Edward Craven Walker, the British inventor behind the iconic lava lamps, experienced a cultural renaissance of his creation in the late 1990s, he unfortunately passed away before seeing its novel digital application in the 21st century.
Decades after their initial popularity as a quirky decorative novelty, 100 of Craven Walker’s innovative lamps have found an unlikely new purpose inside the San Francisco headquarters of web security giant, Cloudflare.
This analog relic from the 1960s has been repurposed to bolster encryption and safeguard large portions of the internet against cyber threats and unauthorized access.
What is a Lava Lamp?
A lava lamp is a novelty decorative lamp created in the 1960s that contains blobs of colored wax inside a glass vessel filled with a clear or translucent liquid. The lava lamp was invented by British entrepreneur Edward Craven Walker in 1963.
The main components are:
- Glass Vessel – A transparent or translucent glass bottle or container, often with a rounded or elongated shape.
- Colored Wax – Brightly colored wax or wax-based mixtures that are slightly denser than the liquid.
- Clear Liquid – A dense liquid, usually a proprietary mixture or formulation, that is immiscible with the wax.
- Light Bulb – A standard incandescent or halogen bulb that generates heat at the base of the vessel.
When the light bulb is turned on, it heats the liquid and the colored wax inside. As the wax heats up, it melts and becomes less dense than the surrounding liquid, causing the molten wax to rise up through the liquid in a lava-like flow.
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As the melted wax rises, it cools and becomes denser again, falling back down through the liquid in globular blobs. This creates a slowly evolving, lava-like motion of blobs rising and falling due to the principles of heat convection and density differences.
Why Cloudflare Harnesses Lava Lamps for Encryption
Strong encryption relies on true randomness to generate unpredictable keys that safeguard data. However, computers are inherently predictable systems – designed to produce consistent, logical outputs from any given input.
This makes them ill-equipped to create the randomness required for secure encryption keys that should be virtually impossible to guess.
To overcome this limitation, computers need a source of randomness in the inherently unpredictable physical world. Lava lamps, with their constantly evolving, chaotic motion of blobs rising and falling, prove to be an ideal source of randomness.
No two moments in a lava lamp are ever exactly alike, ensuring a steady supply of unique, random data.
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Ingeniously, Cloudflare has installed around 100 lava lamps in its San Francisco lobby and aimed multiple cameras at this analog array. The cameras regularly photograph the lava lamps, capturing their ever-changing forms as strings of random numerical data representing each pixel’s values.
These totally random numbers then seed Cloudflare’s servers to generate robust encryption keys for SSL/TLS protocols, fortifying the security of millions of websites.
Randomness and Unpredictability in Cryptography
In cryptography, “randomness” is about more than just statistical distributions – it’s synonymous with unpredictability.
Encrypted data must appear entirely random, devoid of patterns that could be exploited through mathematical analysis to derive the encryption key. Any predictable elements effectively undermine the security.
The encryption process itself follows predictable rules (encrypted data + key = original data). However, the keys must be utterly unpredictable to prevent breaches.
To illustrate, consider two poker players: one employs a predictable strategy of only betting with strong hands, while the other mixes up their tactics unpredictably. The latter player maintains an advantage by avoiding patterns that opponents could detect and exploit to discern their hand strength, despite the hidden “encrypted” cards.
Similarly, if encrypted data transmission follows predictable methods, savvy attackers can potentially deduce the keys and contents, bypassing security measures. True randomness eliminates these exploitable patterns, forming an impenetrable veil of unpredictability over encrypted data.
Enhancing Randomness with Multiple Sources
While operating systems can collect random data from user inputs like mouse movements and keystrokes, this process is relatively slow.
To maximize the unpredictability of its cryptographic seeds for SSL/TLS encryption, Cloudflare combines the random data harvested from its lava lamp array with entropy generated by the Linux operating systems running on two separate machines within its infrastructure.
N/B: Entropy is a measure of data’s randomness or unpredictability. In cybersecurity, entropy is used to protect sensitive information through encryption, authentication, and integrity protection
Embracing Chaos for Added Entropy
Located in Cloudflare’s busy lobby, the lava lamp wall experiences constant foot traffic as people come and go. However, rather than being a hindrance, these pedestrian obstructions inadvertently contribute to the randomness captured by the camera.
Each person passing in front of the lamps introduces new variations and chaos into the visuals, further enriching the entropy collected.
Redundancy for Continuous Security
In the rare instance that the camera monitoring the lava lamps is disabled or damaged, Cloudflare can seamlessly rely on the randomness sources from its Linux servers to maintain encryption integrity.
Moreover, since the lava lamp array resides within Cloudflare’s own premises, the company has direct physical access to promptly restore or replace the camera as needed, mitigating any potential security gaps.
Diverse Approaches to Real-World Randomness
While Cloudflare’s San Francisco headquarters taps into the inherent unpredictability of lava lamps, the company’s other major offices in London and Singapore have adopted their own ingenious methods to harness real-world randomness.
The London office photographs a double pendulum system, capturing its mathematically chaotic movements, while the Singapore facility measures the random decay of a small, harmless pellet of uranium.
Not the First, but an Innovative Approach
Surprisingly, Cloudflare was not the first company to recognize the potential of lava lamps for encryption purposes. In 1996, Silicon Graphics developed a similar system called “Lavarand,” though the patent has since expired.
Nevertheless, Cloudflare’s implementation showcases a creative and effective approach to leveraging the inherent randomness of physical phenomena for robust data security.
