gabe@gabegold.com
Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2018 18:39:58 -0400
Edward Craven Walker lived to see his greatest invention,the lava lamp
<http://www.wired.com/2013/09/lava-lamp-50/ cultural comeback. But the
British tinkerer (and famed nudist, incidentally) died before he could
witness the 21st-century digital potential of his analog creation. Inside
the San Francisco office of theweb security company Cloudflare
<http://www.wired.com/tag/cloudflare/ groovy hardware help protect wide
swaths of the Internet from infiltration.
Here's how it works. Every time you log in to any website, you're assigned a
unique identification number. It should be random, because if hackers can
predict the number, they'll impersonate you. Computers, relying as they do
on human-coded patterns, can't generate true randomness -- but nobody can
predict the goopy mesmeric swirlings of oil, water, and wax. Cloudflare
films the lamps 24/7 and uses the ever-changing arrangement of pixels to
help create a superpowered cryptographic key. ``Anything that the camera
captures gets incorporated into the randomness,'' says Nick Sullivan, the
company's head of cryptography <http://www.wired.com/tag/cryptography/
includes visitors milling about and light streaming through the windows.
(Any change in heat subtly affects the undulations of those glistening
globules.)
Sure,/theoretically/, bad guys could sneak their own camera into
Cloudflare's lobby to capture the same scene, but the company's prepared for
such trickery. It films the movements of a pendulum in its London office and
records the measurements of a Geiger counter in Singapore to add more chaos
to the equation. Crack that, Russians.
http://www.wired.com/story/cloudflare-lava-lamps-protect-from-hackers/