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How A Wall of Lava Lamps Is Protecting The Internet
How this unique technology keeps hackers at bay
Lava lamps were once popular bedside attractions, but those days are long gone. Today, the humble lava lamp seems to have more in common with the waterbed than anything else. They were cool once, but now you’re a weirdo if you still have one. (I used to have a number of different lava lamps as a child, and when I brought up the idea of getting another one for nostalgia’s sake, my wife gave me a withering glare.) What most people don’t realize is that simple lava lamps are working tirelessly to keep the internet safe from hackers. There is a good chance that your favorite website is being kept safe by the soothing glow of lava lamp bubbles.
Lava Lamp Security
Cloudflare is responsible for roughly 20% of the internet’s primary internet traffic. Cloudflare is a web hosting company that manages thousands of different websites. (Medium is a website hosted by Cloudflare.) That means that Cloudflare is responsible for billions of hits of web traffic, many of which could be potentially malicious. In order to deter hackers, Cloudflare has developed an ingenious security system using lava lamps.
In the Cloudflare Headquarters in San Francisco, there is a wall with roughly 100 lava lamps that run continuously. This wall is more than just a fashion statement; it is a key piece of their security apparatus. Above the wall of lava lamps is a camera that is continuously taking data. This camera takes the position of all of the lava in the lamps and feeds it to a security program, which turns those positions into keys, which are then used to build encryption for their web traffic.
Cloudflare does not keep this a secret. They talk about it very openly. The secret is not in the lava lamps themselves but rather what they produce — a constant stream of random information.
