See Cloudflare Encryption Lava Lamps, San Francisco, California

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TheCloudflare lava lampsare used for Internetencryption. Cloudflare covers about 10 percent of international web traffic, including the websites for Uber, OKCupid, and FitBit. Randomness is extremely important for secure encryption. Each new key that a computer uses to encrypt data must be truly random, so that an attacker won't be able to figure out the key and decrypt the data. However, computers are designed to provide predictable, logical outputs based on a given input. They aren't designed to produce the random data needed for creating unpredictable encryption keys. To produce the unpredictable, chaotic data necessary for strong encryption, a computer must have a source of random data. The "real world" turns out to be a great source for randomness, because events in the physical world are unpredictable. As one might expect, lava lamps are consistently random. The "lava" in a lava lamp never takes the same shape twice, and as a result, observing a group of lava lamps is a great source for random data. To collect this data, Cloudflare has arranged about 100 lava lamps on one of the walls in the lobby of the Cloudflare headquarters and mounted a camera pointing at the lamps. The camera takes photos of the lamps at regular intervals and sends the images to Cloudflare servers. All digital images are really stored by computers as a series of numbers, with each pixel having its own numerical value, and so each image becomes a string of totally random numbers that the Cloudflare servers can then use as a starting point for creating secure encryption keys. It’s possible for visitors to witness these lava lamps in person. Simply enter the lobby of Cloudflare’s San Francisco headquarters and ask to see the lava lamp display.

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