There’s a security reason behind why Cloudflare’s office has a wall with 100 lava lamps.

One of the important aspects of encryption is randomness. To make it harder for an attacker to figure out the key to decrypt data, every key a computer uses for encryption must be extremely random.

In this case, computers aren’t the best at generating encryption keys, since they’re designed to produce logical outputs from given data. As the company notes, its programs are grounded in “if-then statements,” which means that if certain conditions are met, it performs a specific action.

But it can still be used to create this unpredictable data for encryption if it’s given random data, notes Cloudflare.

The company also found that “‘real world’ turns out to be a great source for randomness, because events in the physical world are unpredictable.” That’s why it uses lava lamps to help with creating random data for secure encryption.

The reason for choosing lava lamps is that their patterns are always different. The company found that this could be used as a “great source for random data.”

How does this process work? Cloudflare used 100 lava lamps, placed on the wall of its lobby, and pointed a camera at them. The images captured are then sent to Cloudflare’s servers and stored as a series of numbers, with each pixel owning a numerical value.

This way, every photo becomes a “string of totally random numbers.” These numbers are then used to create encryption keys.

The company reveals that operating systems use different sources of random data for encryption. Cloudflare states that it mixes data from the lava lamps with the one generated by the Linux operating system to “maximize” the unpredictability, or “entropy.”

One of the questions the company raised was: What happens if someone stands in front of this wall? Is it a bad thing? Not at all, since in this case, such disruption becomes part of the unpredictability.

Cloudflare has also prepared for situations when the camera may no longer be available to take pictures, with the company having “two other sources for randomization from the Linux operating system running on Cloudflare servers.”

Using lava lamps for encryption isn’t a new method – it was first used in 1996 by Silicon Graphics, which created a similar system.

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