[1]How Cloudflare Uses Lava Lamps to Guard Against Hackers:
Edward Craven Walker lived to see his greatest invention, [2]the lava
lamp, make its late-'90s cultural comeback. But the British tinkerer
(and famed nudist, incidentally) died before he could witness the 21st-
century digital potential of his analog creation. Inside the San
Francisco office of the [3]web security company Cloudflare, 100 units
of Craven Walker's groovy hardware help protect wide swaths of the
internet from infiltration.
Here's how it works. Every time you log in to any website, you're
assigned a unique identification number. It should be random, because
if hackers can predict the number, they'll impersonate you. Computers,
relying as they do on human-coded patterns, can't generate true
randomness-but nobody can predict the goopy mesmeric swirlings of oil,
water, and wax. Cloudflare films the lamps 24/7 and uses the
ever-changing arrangement of pixels to help create a superpowered
cryptographic key. "Anything that the camera captures gets incorporated
into the randomness," says Nick Sullivan, the company's head of
[4]cryptography, and that includes visitors milling about and light
streaming through the windows. (Any change in heat subtly affects the
undulations of those glistening globules.)
Sure, theoretically, bad guys could sneak their own camera into
Cloudflare's lobby to capture the same scene, but the company's
prepared for such trickery. It films the movements of a pendulum in its
London office and records the measurements of a Geiger counter in
Singapore to add more chaos to the equation. Crack that, Russians.
(Via [5]Security Latest)
I love the analog nature of this plus the additional geographically
disbursed randomness in the system.
I think I first heard about the use of lava lamps for RNG operations in
the late '90s or early 2000's. I went so far as to buy a few to set up
a smaller version of the Cloudflare rig, but my ex-wife "borrowed" them
permanently. Sadly, I've lived without strong randomness ever since.
Also on:
[6]Twitter
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My original entry is here: [7]How Cloudflare Uses Lava Lamps to Guard
Against Hackers ←. It posted Mon, 30 Jul 2018 13:11:06 +0000.
Filed under: business, tech,
References
1.
https://www.wired.com/story/cloudflare-lava-lamps-protect-from-hackers
2.
https://www.wired.com/2013/09/lava-lamp-50/
3.
https://www.wired.com/tag/cloudflare/
4.
https://www.wired.com/tag/cryptography/
5.
https://www.wired.com/feed/category/security/latest/rss
6.
https://twitter.com/TokyoGringo/status/1023920010283175936
7.
https://www.prjorgensen.com/?p=1355
