What Do Lava Lamps Have to Do With Website Security?

It might sound odd, but lava lamps are helping keep the internet secure. At Cloudflare’s San Francisco HQ, there’s a wall of over 100 lava lamps bubbling away 24/7, not just for decoration, but as part of a high-tech encryption system.

Here’s how it works:

• Lava lamps produce unpredictable motion. The constantly shifting shapes inside the lamps never repeat, making them a perfect source of natural randomness.

• A camera films the lava wall in real-time. This live footage is turned into streams of data based on pixel values from the video.

• That data is used to generate encryption keys. The randomness is fed into cryptographic systems to help secure sensitive information online, like passwords and personal data.

• Why randomness matters: Computers on their own aren’t great at generating truly random numbers. That’s a problem for encryption, which relies on unpredictability to stay secure. Lava lamps provide a real-world solution.

It might seem quirky, but it’s clever. Using natural, chaotic patterns, like bubbling lava, makes it much harder for hackers to guess or recreate encryption keys. It’s just one example of how innovative solutions are used behind the scenes to keep the internet safe.

How We Use Cloudflare at Innermedia

We don’t have a wall of lava lamps in our office (though it’s tempting), but we do use Cloudflare on all the websites we manage. It’s an essential tool in how we keep our sites fast, secure, and running smoothly.

Cloudflare acts like a protective barrier that sits in front of a website. It filters traffic, blocks threats, and speeds up loading times by using its own global network.

Here’s what that means in practical terms:

• Website protection: Cloudflare shields our sites from DDoS attacks, malware, and other online threats, keeping them secure and online even during high-traffic periods.

• Speed and performance: By storing cached versions of websites across a network of servers worldwide, Cloudflare delivers content quickly to users, no matter where they are. This includes edge caching, which stores static HTML at multiple locations closer to the end user.

• Built-in firewall: It stops suspicious or malicious traffic from reaching the site, filtering out problems before they cause any damage.

• Domain protection: Cloudflare helps secure domains from being hijacked or attacked, adding another layer of defence behind the scenes.

• Modern performance boosts: Cloudflare supports technologies like HTTP/3 and Early Hints, which allow browsers to load content faster and more efficiently. It also handles image optimisation and file compression automatically to improve site speed without compromising visual quality.

At Innermedia, we use Cloudflare to give our clients the peace of mind that their websites are always protected, without compromising performance. It’s a smart, efficient way to keep everything running as it should, so we can focus on delivering high-quality design, SEO, and digital strategy.

Cloudflare’s lava lamp wall might grab headlines, but it’s the technology behind it that really matters. Whether it’s random data generation or world-class website protection, Cloudflare helps us stay one step ahead when it comes to security and performance.

And while we might not have lava lamps of our own, we’re big fans of any solution that helps keep the internet safer, and faster, for everyone.