5 ms·
Is this just for PR/show and the real entropy generator is standardized across sites to be something boring in some back room? Or if a terrorist came in and cut
by umvi 2y ago
Is this just for PR/show and the real entropy generator is standardized across sites to be something boring in some back room? Or if a terrorist came in and cut power to a chaos wall would it really cause an extended outage?
- linsomniac 2y ago>if a terrorist came in and cut power to a chaos wall That's an interesting way of saying "if the wall loses power". Your name wouldn't be Hans Gruber, would it?
- 6stringmerc 2y ago“I’m a thief and an excellent one at that, and considering I’ve just promoted myself to kidnapper, you should show some respect!”
- gunian 2y agomeh hollywood needs to upgrade its villains lol their narrative is just boring and trite
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jgrahamc 2y agoDetails of how we use this are here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/harnessing-office-chaos/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/harnessing-office-chaos/
- brookst 2y agoIt's an odd world when a hypothetical terrorist is looking to reduce entropy.
- thinkingtoilet 2y agoIf your goal is to weaken encryption, reducing entropy could be a step along that path.
- brookst 2y agoSure, but it is amusing to imagine terrorist cells plotting to reduce entropy. There's a SF story to be had here: the global superintelligence uses bits of litter and fallen leaves and stuff to generate unbreakable encryption; the terrorists wage a global campaign to clean up litter, prune trees, get everything neat and orderly in order to hack the system...
- thinkingtoilet 2y agoAgreed! Your comment did give me a chuckle.
- rzzzt 2y agoLava lamp factories are subverted so that the wax mixture flows in a straight line without any turbulence whatsoever. Dice land on a 3 each time they are rolled, anywhere in the world. Casinos disintegrate swiftly accompanied by a bright flash.
- brookst 2y agoPlaying card companies are infiltrated and produce decks with nothing but the four of hearts. Coins are melted down and recast with both sides tails. Chaos. No, wait, order.
- deadbabe 2y agoIt’s a form of eco-terrorism.
- amarcheschi 2y agoIt sounds something straight out of a cyberpunk novel, some sort of enthropy thief
- pbnjay 2y agoGiven the redundancy of multiple locations, I think even cutting power it would be difficult to cause an extended outage.
- jgrahamc 2y agoThat sort of happened on "NCIS", Season 16, Episode 1: https://blog.cloudflare.com/statement-concerning-events-at-glowbeam-technologies/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/statement-concerning-events-at-g...
- crazygringo 2y agoIt just injects additional randomness into randomness that is already perfectly fine. It's basically for PR/show, but it is actually used. But without it, things work fine too.
- thih9 2y agoIf it silently crashed and started to output a static number, would this affect any systems negatively?
- luuio 2y agoa random number (existing entropy) XOR with a static number (the crashed wall) is still a random number, me think
- crazygringo 2y agoSurely not. If you're seeding a PRNG from multiple sources of entropy, you generally concatenate them. Or if you were limited in bytes you'd XOR them. This is why, in an app, you might seed with timestamp and process ID and /dev/urandom, in case any of them happen to be non-unique or unsupported.
- ycombinatrix 2y agoProbably not, unless it is their only source of entropy.
- jedberg 2y agoI asked this last time about the one in London, and was told that one of the checks is that the image has changed since the last run. Otherwise the data isn't used. Prevents not only technical issues but attacks like someone blocking the camera or putting a static photo in front of the camera.
- thih9 2y agoInteresting - sounds like it would have some negative effect then. Thanks for sharing. Now I wonder about some periodic offsets. E.g. if the lights are off at night, or if the skies are overcast in winter, does it skew the results in some significant way. I seriously doubt that though.
- eastdakota 2y agoGreat thing about entropy is that adding more never hurts. This is one of many sources — both more conventional as well as unconventional — that we use. If it were to go offline, or somehow be corrupted, it wouldn’t hurt our ability to generate entropy across the Cloudflare network. What I love about this, the lava lamp wall in San Francisco, and the double pendulums in London, is that it takes something very abstract and makes it tangible for our team and our customers.
- AdamN 2y agoThese are my favorite types of marketing - what I'll just call 'part of the actual stack'. Would be great if there was a Berlin office so I could join!
- jstasiak 2y ago> Great thing about entropy is that adding more never hurts. I used to think the same but here's a counter-example of a (hypothetical) attack based on a malicious entropy source being able to manipulate the hash/PRNG output: https://blog.cr.yp.to/20140205-entropy.html https://blog.cr.yp.to/20140205-entropy.html Now, it's not necessarily the most likely attack to materialize, as already pointed out downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43391377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43391377.
- AStonesThrow 2y agoAh, pendulums. They had some cool ones in the museums we used to visit. One was 2+ stories high and it would knock down dominoes to reckon the time of day as the Earth perturbed its motions. Another much smaller pendulum in the hands-on science exhibits, you scooped sand into it and then set it swinging freely across a square black surface. It would trace out amazing patterns as it spilled sand hourglass-style. So then some bully would rock up next to me and smack the pendulum, stop it from swinging, and spill a big blob on the formerly-geometric pattern. And they invariably said "just to see what would happen". AStonesThrow would have a small meltdown or become rather indigant. I suppose their empirical science is just as valid as kicking down sandcastles on the beach. And that's how I came to prefer single-player games...
- gunian 2y agoman terrorists are so basic these days they should not be considered entropy more like extremely predictable load tests conducted by powers that be lmao
- tptacek 2y agoIt is 1000x for PR/show. There is no practical security benefit to stuff like this. There's also no meaningful risks to doing it. It just lets them write fun blog posts.
- dadrian 2y agoIf they actually integrate this into randomness on their TLS servers, the only risk is that the system for getting the entropy from the lamps and waves somehow screws up, fails to parse an HTTP request or something, and accidentally seeds the whole system with no entropy. Whereas doing literally nothing and just letting Linux boot correctly on metal would be perfectly secure.
- tptacek 2y agoRight, but there's no way Cloudflare is making that kind of mistake. If it was a random person on HN talking about how they'd hooked up a bespoke hardware RNG to their TLS stack I'd write some tut-tutting thing about what could go wrong, but here the security of their system collapses down to the LRNG just like every else's.
- swyx 2y agoi mean its also nice office decoration and also lets them rank on HN. many companies spend far more on employer branding with far less results.
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- ivirshup 2y agoI think there are backup systems. I sometimes walk by the Cloudflare SF offices on weekends and it looks like the lava lamps are off.
- eastdakota 2y agoThey should never all be off at the same time. We do cycle through each of them turning off for a period of the day. But, even if they were all off, there are lots of other sources of entropy we use, most of which are for more traditional if far less visually interesting.
- theandrewbailey 2y agoData centers are filled with loud fans that scream 24/7. I would think plugging in a microphone to servers and using that to seed entropy would be a more scalable and portable solution than cameras looking at lava lamps or water in the office miles away. There has to be some code that already does that.
- coppsilgold 2y agoThe image sensor noise will produce more bits of randomness than the chaotic display. There is also dedicated "TRNG" hardware which will measure random thermal noise. Some will even get fancy with quantum effects. Any source of randomness will do, you just feed it into a hash function and extract uniform randomness you can use in cryptography. For example, if you have an image sensor that takes an image (and does no post-processing) and you feed that image into SHA256 you get 256 bits which you can use for cryptography. As long as the image is never saved there is no practical way to recreate the input and in fact the input will contain more entropy (degrees of freedom) than the output, so no one would even want to try. Most of the degrees of freedom in the image would come from sensor noise and not the scene, so you don't even need to take off the cap from the camera. In practice, multiple sources are combined. The Linux kernel does this for /dev/[u]random though it doesn't use the camera. There is a potential risk with such combination: one of the inputs may come from a source which is able to interrogate all the other sources, it would then be able to adversarially choose its contribution to skew RNG results. This is a somewhat obscure and unlikely threat model.
- calmbonsai 2y agoYes. It's just PR. One can just reverse-bias some Zener diodes to get the same thing, but it is beautiful PR.
- bob1029 2y agoTechnically speaking, we can generate and store an unlimited amount of information/entropy for future use. It doesn't really go bad unless you disseminate the material to inappropriate parties. You could store terabytes of it in S3 buckets for an emergency.