3 ms·
Yes, it is. I'm not sure what you think that post says, but it means LavaRand is currently serving a purpose in production. The whole point is to add more rando
by mkr-hn 5y ago
Yes, it is. I'm not sure what you think that post says, but it means LavaRand is currently serving a purpose in production. The whole point is to add more randomness to their other methods to protect against exploits or failures in the implementation of those methods. This is like the drives in a RAID setup. All those drives are a waste of power if you only care about when things work right. The point is to provide safety when things break.
The previous paragraph:
>> "LavaRand is a system that uses lava lamps as a secondary source of randomness for our production servers. A wall of lava lamps in the lobby of our San Francisco office provides an unpredictable input to a camera aimed at the wall. A video feed from the camera is fed into a CSPRNG, and that CSPRNG provides a stream of random values that can be used as an extra source of randomness by our production servers. Since the flow of the “lava” in a lava lamp is very unpredictable,1 “measuring” the lamps by taking footage of them is a good way to obtain unpredictable randomness. Computers store images as very large numbers, so we can use them as the input to a CSPRNG just like any other number."
- treesknees 5y agoBut unfortunately it's not. In the analogy given in the comment I responded to, these lava lamps are a locomotive burning fuel while not actually moving any load. Sure it's there to "serve a purpose" if the primary breaks, but that doesn't mean it's doing any work when the primary is functioning just fine.
- mkr-hn 5y agoThis is the check on the primary. It moots the concern of whether or not the primary is working. You could turn them off, but then the system is open to all the vulnerabilities known and unknown this mitigates.