Cloudflare showcases their new office in Lisbon, Portugal, after previously using lava lamps to decorate their office in San Francisco to generate random numbers. This new office utilizes wooden wave motion machines as a new source of randomness.
The office in Lisbon features Hughes Wave Motion Machines, which have motors inside that create waves when the machine is in motion. Cloudflare commissioned special models measuring 45 centimeters and placed 50 machines on the office walls.
Cloudflare’s random number generation process relies on video footage of these walls to generate image hashes, which are then used as seeds for the Key Derivation Function (KDF). This is then opened up as the LavaRand API for various services to use. A common experience for users is that Math.random in Cloudflare Workers also utilizes random values from these lava images.
The randomness in our computers comes from various sources such as Wi-Fi strength, user keystrokes, and even the newest CPUs have built-in random number generators. However, having additional sources of randomness can be mixed with the existing ones to ensure high-quality random values at all times. If the existing random sources are not of good quality, it may open up avenues for hackers to predict encryption keys. This calls for exploring different hacking techniques in the future.
TLDR: Cloudflare unveils a new office in Lisbon, Portugal, using wave motion machines as a new source of randomness for their random number generation process.
Leave a Comment