Cloudflare, a security service provider, uses lava lamps to secure sensitive data. Yes, they use the same lava lamps from your childhood bedroom. How? For any information to be passed from one source to another, it must be sent in batches called packets and encrypted using various mathematical equations. This information is decrypted with a specific key that’s given to a user to prevent outside sources from accessing the data. There are many methods of encryption, but most can be solved eventually because computers can’t generate truly random numbers.

Computers are logic-based and therefore run on millions of ‘if-else’ statements; they must be predictable to function. Many circumvent this issue using pseudorandom methods, but these methods aren’t truly random and haven’t been proven to output truly random numbers.

This raises the question: how does one receive a truly random number as a key for a user accessing the data? There are many answers, such as mouse movements or keyboard typing, but for one company — Cloudflare — lava lamps are the solution. Lava lamps contain liquid inside that floats around, and they cannot be predicted with any mathematical equation one may try. Lava lamps are truly random and unpredictable–exactly what’s needed for encryption.

Cloudflare places 100 lava lamps on a wall with a camera monitoring them consistently. They take snapshots of the lava lamps and use those in math equations to generate a completely unpredictable key for users. Furthermore, many people walk in front of the camera daily, but this only increases the entropy.

If lava lamps were the only method Cloudflare uses, one could take an image of the lava lamps and solve for a key that way, but Cloudflare has three headquarters, each using different methods to augment the unpredictability of their encryption. Their headquarters in California uses lava lamps; their headquarters in London uses the swinging of a large double-pendulum system mounted in an office, which contains various sets of two pendulums linked and mathematically impossible to predict, and their headquarters in Singapore measures the radioactive decay of a small piece of uranium. All of these measurements are combined to create a truly unpredictable key.

Cloudflare. (2024). How do lava lamps help with Internet encryption? Cloudflare.com. https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-encryption/

Airhart, E. (2018, July 29). How a Bunch of Lava Lamps Protect Us From Hackers. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/cloudflare-lava-lamps-protect-from-hackers/