Cloud flare handles over 5 trillion web page requests every day most of which
are encrypted to protect your data but did you know that this encryption
depends on lava lamps I'm talking regular lava lamps
like you can get on Amazon what does the
lava have some kind of super secret processing capability that's soon to put
AMD and Intel out of business obviously not but the lava is a great source of
natural entropy which is a measure of disorder if you think back to high
school physics the reason natural entropy is important is that it provides
natural Randomness which can be used to encrypt data you see the lava inside a
lava lamp which is actually just wax Flows In naturally random unpredictable
patterns once the lamp is heated just like how you can't predict exactly how
steam rises from a Boiling Pot for example a camera at Cloud Flare's
headquarters is pointed at a wall of approximately 100 lava lamps and takes a
photo ever so often to capture the exact pattern the lava lamps are showing those
photos are then sent to a computer that gives each pixel a numerical value
depending on its appearance creating a random numerical string that becomes
what we call a cryptographic seed this seed number is fed into a mathematical
function that creates another seed which then gets fed into a number generator
whose outputs can be used for cryptographic Keys used to encrypt and
decrypt traffic making it difficult for attackers to see what you're looking at
these keys are also used to confirm that the communication actually came from the
website you're connected to preventing your data from flowing to an attacker
that's pretending to be a legitimate service but actually isn't a legitimate
service but Laval lamps are actually not the only random objects used to create
natural Randomness we'll tell you about some other hilarious setups that
cloudflare specifically uses and why they're even necessary since can't we
just use computers right after we thank ODU if your business needs a website ODU
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description besides lava lamps some of cloud fl's offices use swinging
pendulums or rainbow mobiles that get blown around by the air conditioning
even if someone were to walk in front of these installations when the camera
captures their photo that's actually completely fine as that just adds a
different kind of Randomness to the image cloudflare even has an
installation in Singapore where the natural decay of a chunk of uranium is
the randomness source but why all this roll it turns out computers are much
worse than Mother Nature at generating true Randomness while there are lots of
easily accessible random number generators out there many of them are
pseudo random rather than truly random but what's the difference well pseudo
random number generators produce numbers by using an algorithm meaning that
they're predictable if you know the seed as the same seed will produce the same
output every time unless that seed is truly random there's no actual true
Randomness in the process meaning that you could guess a cryptographic key if
you know the seed and on many pseudo random number generators that may not be
that hard to do if the seed is something fairly easy to guess like the date or
the time as are commonly used and this might be fine if you're just trying to
decide on a random number for something like a D20 rooll in your D and D game
but for trying to keep internet traffic secure a truly random hard toog guess
seed from a natural entropy source is essential but if you're in need of a
random number generator in your own home for whatever reason we recommend lava
lamps over radioactive materials in the long term they're less bad for you
thanks for watching guys if you like this video check out our other video on a cloudflare mishap that took a good
chunk of the internet offline those guys