If you’re a geek with an interest in cryptography, you know that one of the hardest problems in practical<\/i> cryptography is random number generation. A weak PRG (pseudorandom number generator) is one of the surest ways to get a cryptographic protocol compromised. Most PRGs depend on random events such as mouse activity, disk latency, and other such non-deterministic events to seed the PRG with the required randomness. <\/p>\n
You may also know that lava lamps<\/a>, that refuge from the 1960s, can also produce random numbers<\/a>1<\/a><\/sup> but if you’re like me, you’ve probably always considered that a (geek) cocktail party factoid of no particular use. It turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong. Cloudflare, which handles about 10% of international Internet Web traffic, uses lava lamps to generate their random numbers<\/a>. They have a wall with over 100 lava lamps that are busily bubbling away. A video camera captures the action and sends it to a computer for conversion into random numbers. This is an elegant and relatively low cost way of producing the large amount of random numbers that an operation like Cloudflare requires. <\/p>\n Oddly, the 53 year old fad remains strong to this day and you can still get a lava lamp<\/a>. It makes me wonder what the Hippies would have thought of their beloved lava lamps being used as an integral part of computer communications. <\/p>\n If you’re interested in the details, here’s a nice explanation<\/a>. It’s a lot simpler than you might think. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you’re a geek with an interest in cryptography, you know that one of the hardest problems in practical cryptography is random number generation. A weak PRG (pseudorandom number generator) is one of the surest ways to get a cryptographic … Continue reading Footnotes: <\/h2>\n