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The Grooviest Random Number Generator Ever

Cloudflare is one of those Internet companies you use all the time, but don't usually know it. Big websites you visit use Cloudflare to shore up their defenses against denial of service attacks. The company needed some truly random numbers for its security solutions, so it turned to some groovy old tech: lava lamps. In their office is a wall of 100 lava lamps monitored by cameras. The reaction of the lamps is unpredictable, and this allows them to generate really random numbers. [Joshua], a Cloudflare employee, talks about the technical details of the system in a recent blog post.

You might think this is a new and novel idea, but it turns out the LavaRnd (or maybe it is LavaRand — there's some dispute if you read the comments below) system has been around for a while. In fact, we covered it way back in 2005. Silicon Graphics patented the system in 1996.

You would think these lava lamps would be locked in a bunker somewhere. It turns out, you can see the wall of lava lamps by just visiting Cloudflare's offices in San Francisco. People disturbing the images are one of the sources of random unpredictability.

The company doesn't directly use the random numbers from the lamps. [Joshua] explains how on a reboot, each production machine grabs a chunk of random numbers and uses it to seed its usual random number generators. This leads to an interesting problem of ensuring everyone is who they say they are without relying on the very secure protocols you are trying to spin up with random numbers. You can read the solution to that conundrum in the blog post.

You can see a video of the Cloudflare lava wall by [Tom Scott], below. If you don't need a random number generator, maybe you could use a spectrum analyzer.

Thanks to [Ptkwilliams] for the tip.

A Relay-Based Pseudorandom Number Generator

There are a great variety of ways to build a random number generator, and similarly many ways to generate numbers that appear random, but in a pure mathematical sense generally aren't. [Daniel Valuch] built a Christmas decoration that does the latter, displaying the results on an attractive flashing ornament.

The build relies on a 16-bit linear feedback shift register, or LFSR. The LFSR generates a stream of numbers, with each number dependent on the previous state of the register. Thus, the numbers generated are pseudorandom, not truly random, and depend on the initial seed value of the system. [Daniel] built the shift register using relays, which create a lovely clacking sound as the register operates, and LEDs, which glow depending on the values in the register.

The result is a cute Christmas ornament that blinks in a deterministic fashion, and has a great old-school look due to the exposed copper of the PCB and the retro LED colors used. The project also serves as a great way to learn about shift registers and basic relay logic, though the latter is rarely used these days for serious purposes. We've covered the topic before, too. Video after the break.

True Random Number Generator (TRNG)

XIP8001B from Xiphera is a True Random Number Generator (TRNG) Intellectual Property (IP) core designed in generic and portable VHDL. XIP8001B has been designed for easy integration with FPGA- and ASIC-based designs, and consequently its design methodology is vendor-agnostic, and the functionality of XIP8001B does not rely on any FPGA manufacturerspecific features. XIP8001B includes the NIST SP 800-90B specified startup tests and online health tests.

The output of the entropy source (the so-called "raw bits") in XIP8001B have been successfully tested with PractRand, gjrand, TestU01, NIST SP 800-22 statistical test suite and the dieharder test suite. XIP8001B includes a NIST SP 800-90B compliant AES-CBC-MAC -based entropy extractor, thus making XIP8001B suitable for use in a crypto module targeting a FIPS 140-2 certification.

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