• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Around 10 Percent Of The Internet Is Encrypted Via Lava Lamps

October 25, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

We don’t want to sound completely unhinged, like someone yelling “sharks have been around the galaxy twice” (they have) or “McFlurries look the way they do because of hedgehogs” (they do), but around 10 percent of the Internet is encrypted via lava lamps.

Encryption, in its most basic form, is scrambling data (be that text, image, or video) so that only the sender and recipient with their encryption keys can read it. Though now associated with computing, encryption has been around for centuries, with the first recorded cipher dating back to around 400 BCE, used by Spartan military officers to secretly communicate.

Advertisement

Encryption varies in complexity. By using simple substitution ciphers (e.g. a = b, b = c, and so on) you are taking plain text and converting it into encrypted ciphertext, which someone else can convert back to readable text if they have (or guess) your very simple key. Meanwhile, in computer encryption, 56-bit encryption keys, with 72,057,594,037,927,936 possibilities, proved themselves to be too easy to crack when they were solved by security experts on refurbished computer equipment within 56 hours by brute force.

As well as using 128-bit or higher keys, security experts try to make them harder to break by making them as random as possible. Computers, with their ordered logical “if this then that” way of working, are not great at introducing randomness, but fortunately for your encrypted top-secret WhatsApp meme group, we have other ways of doing that, including lava lamps.



YouTuber Tom Scott visits the encryption lamps.

Advertisement

“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,” CloudFare , which encrypts up to 10 percent of the Internet using the lava lamp method, explains on their website. 

“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.”

At CloudFare, there is a wall of around 100 lava lamps, which are running and doing their gloopy thing. At intervals, a camera pointed at the lamps takes a photo. The random colors of the pixels are then used to create an encryption key.

“All digital images are really stored by computers as a series of numbers, with each pixel having its own numerical value,” CloudFare explained, “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.”

Advertisement

The unpredictable nature of this key, with no obvious patterns to the long number string that can be discerned and used to crack the code, makes it very effective as an encryption method, whilst also giving your data a nice, retro-70s vibe as a side product.

[H/T: Atlas Obscura]

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Paris ramps up security as jihadist attacks trial starts
  2. Cricket-‘Western bloc’ has let Pakistan down, board chief says
  3. Ancient Bison Found In Permafrost Is So Well Preserved Scientists Want To Clone It
  4. Where Inside Us Do We Feel Love?

Source Link: Around 10 Percent Of The Internet Is Encrypted Via Lava Lamps

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Watch This Funky Sea Pig Dancing Its Way Through The Deep Sea, Over 2,300 Meters Below The Surface
  • NASA Lets YouTuber Steve Mould Test His “Weird Chain Theory” In Space
  • The Oldest Stalagmite Ever Dated Was Found In Oklahoma Rocks, Dating Back 289 Million Years
  • 2024’s Great American Eclipse Made Some Birds Behave In Surprising Ways, But Not All Were Fooled
  • “Carter Catastrophe”: The Math Equation That Predicts The End Of Humanity
  • Why Is There No Nobel Prize For Mathematics?
  • These Are The Only Animals Known To Incubate Eggs In Their Stomachs And Give “Birth” Out Their Mouths
  • Constipated? This One Fruit Could Help, Says First-Ever Evidence-Led Diet Guidance
  • NGC 2775: This Galaxy Breaks The Rules Of “Galactic Evolution” And Baffles Astronomers
  • Meet The “Four-Eyed” Hirola, The World’s Most Endangered Antelope With Fewer Than 500 Left
  • The Bizarre 1997 Experiment That Made A Frog Levitate
  • There’s A Very Good Reason Why October 1582 On Your Phone Is Missing 10 Days
  • Skynet-1A: Military Spacecraft Launched 56 Years Ago Has Been Moved By Persons Unknown
  • There’s A Simple Solution To Helping Avoid Erectile Dysfunction (But You’re Not Going To Like It)
  • Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS May Be 10 Billion Years Old, This Rare Spider Is Half-Female, Half-Male Split Down The Middle, And Much More This Week
  • Why Do Trains Not Have Seatbelts? It’s Probably Not What You Think
  • World’s Driest Hot Desert Just Burst Into A Rare And Fleeting Desert Bloom
  • Theoretical Dark Matter Infernos Could Melt The Earth’s Core, Turning It Liquid
  • North America’s Largest Mammal Once Numbered 60 Million – Then Humans Nearly Drove It To Extinction
  • North America’s Largest Ever Land Animal Was A 21-Meter-Long Titan
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version