Randomness 101: LavaRand in Production

Cloudflare uses lava lamps in the lobby of their San Francisco office to generate random numbers for cryptography. The unpredictable flow of "lava" in the lamps is captured by a camera, and the video feed is fed into a Cryptographically Secure Pseudorandom Number Generator (CSPRNG). This system, known as LavaRand, serves as an additional source of randomness for their production servers. The idea was inspired by a similar system proposed by Silicon Graphics in 1996.