Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, they were; they mentioned it explicitly.
The article doesn’t actually mention SGI.
It’s tptacek. He’s probably spoken with Cloudflare directly or consulted for them.
A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
61–70 of 157 posts
Re: A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
#62Re: A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
#63Re: A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
#64It's worth nothing that the lava lamps are visible street side through large glass windows, so it serves as an eye-catching artpiece for passerbys.
Re: A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
#65Re: A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
#66Re: A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
#67Cloudflare's own blog posts about this:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/lavarand-in-production-the-nitty...
https://blog.cloudflare.com/randomness-101-lavarand-in-produ...
Re: A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
#68Re: A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
#69We did this exact thing at SGI 20 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavarand I wonder if Cloudflare was inspired by that.
> We're not the first ones to do this. Our LavaRand system was inspired by a similar system first proposed and built by Silicon Graphics and patented in 1996 (the patent has since expired).
-- https://blog.cloudflare.com/randomness-101-lavarand-in-produ...
Re: A wall of lava lamps helps encrypt the internet
#70I might be prejudiced, but this looks like a big PR stunt/done for the cool factor kind of thing. Aren't there simpler/saner alternatives for getting good randomness?
For sure. In another office they use a geiger counter (a much more standard way to get randomness, and probably easier to setup). That said, this doubles as a public art installation in their lobby - something many companies spend thousands (or millions!) of dollars on. So it's not just PR, it's actually surprisingly practical.
Geiger counter might happen to be very vulnerable to collocated attacks. Overwhelm counter with non-random radiation, compromise a batch of keys produced during the burst,