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Credit to Author: Ellen Airhart| Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2018 12:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n Edward Craven Walker <\/span>lived to see his greatest invention, the lava lamp<\/a>, make its late-\u201990s cultural comeback. But the British tinkerer (and famed nudist, incidentally) died before he could witness the 21st-\u00adcentury digital potential of his analog creation. Inside the San Francisco office of the web security company Cloudflare<\/a>, 100 units of Craven Walker\u2019s groovy hardware help protect wide swaths of the internet from infiltration.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s how it works. Every time you log in to any website, you\u2019re assigned a unique identification number. It should be random, because if hackers can predict the number, they\u2019ll impersonate you. Computers, relying as they do on human-coded patterns, can\u2019t generate true randomness\u2014but 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. \u201cAnything that the camera captures gets incorporated into the randomness,\u201d says Nick Sullivan, the company\u2019s head of cryptography<\/a>, and that includes visitors milling about and light streaming through the windows. (Any change in heat subtly affects the undulations of those glistening globules.)<\/p>\n Sure, theoretically<\/em>, bad guys could sneak their own camera into Cloudflare\u2019s lobby to capture the same scene, but the company\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n This article appears in the July issue. Subscribe now<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n