Lava Lamps and Internet Security

The security of data in our internet-connected world hinges on the generation of very large random numbers. True randomness, however, is next to impossible to achieve, so modern internet security firms work very hard to find ways to generate numbers that seem as random as possible. One such company has found a solution in the form of lava lamps.

A lava lamp is a bottle filled with water and blobs of wax, both brightly coloured. A hot lamp in the base of the lamp heats up the contents of the bottle, melting the wax which gloopily rises, where it cools and falls back to the base before being heated up and rising again. The motion of the wax in the lamp is chaotic, which means that it is very hard to predict.

Lava Lamps, by Mike Mozart

Internet security company Cloudflare have in their headquarters not just one lava lamp, but one hundred of them. There is a camera constantly watching this wall of chaotic-motion generators. As digital images are stored as a series of numbers describing aspects of each pixel, and each pixel's input is based on a highly chaotic process, this means that each resulting image file does a very good impression of a random number.

Read more about this on Cloudflare's website at the link below:

How do Lava Lamps Help With Internet Security?