How Lava Lamps Help Secure the Internet

As far as data encryption goes, you wouldn’t expect a bunch of lights to help secure anything—certainly not 1970s-style lava lamps. But, as it turns out, the exact opposite is true. Cloudflare, a major infrastructure company that supports large portions of the internet, actually uses 100 lava lamps for SSL encryption. The blueprint for secure encryption is randomness. The encryption “key” is what unlocks the data for secure systems and allows it to be read. By keeping keys random, systems can prevent unauthorized access to protected data.

The Role of Randomness in Encryption

This concept is similar to how encrypted messaging apps work, minus the psychedelic decor. The lava lamps help create those keys. As Cloudflare describes it, “To produce the unpredictable, chaotic data necessary for strong encryption, a computer must have a source of random data.” Lava lamps are “consistently random” because no pattern inside is ever the same. The gelatinous lava is always twisting, conforming, and bobbing, and 100 of them arranged provide a source of “chaotic” data.

How It Works

To make it work, 100 lava lamps rest on shelves at Cloudflare headquarters. A camera takes a photo of those lamps at regular intervals, capturing the random shapes inside, and then sends the image to Cloudflare servers. As images are nothing more than data—stored by computers as a series of numbers, where each pixel has a distinct numerical value—the team can utilize these “strings” to create an encryption key.

Entropy and Security

The general idea of the lava lamp wall is to provide “entropy,” which is another word for chaos or disorganization. But in cryptography, entropy is responsible for generating unpredictability, which makes encryption keys and encryption altogether secure. So, more randomness is always good. Because the visual image is translated into a string, anything the image shows is incorporated into that randomness, including people walking in front of the wall or interrupting the photos.

As Cloudflare explains, “obstructions become part of the randomness that the camera captures,” including people or objects that appear in the photos. That randomness boosts security.

Backup Systems and History

Cloudflare protects about 20% of the entire internet, including major websites like Apple, X (Twitter), Discord, and Zoom, essentially making lava lamps a core part of the internet’s operation. Though, Cloudflare does have a backup system for randomization: two other sources running on a Linux operating system on the Cloudflare servers. So, should anything ever happen to the camera or photos, like if the camera is damaged, the backup sources will take over.

Surprisingly, Cloudflare isn’t the first company to do something like this. In the 1990s, a company called Silicon Graphics designed the original “Lavarand” system, which was patented at the time—that patent has since expired.