Skip to content
DevMeme
6077 of 7590
The Enthusiast's Random Number Generator vs. The Pragmatist's Nightmare
Cryptography Post #6656 · source on Telegram

The Enthusiast's Random Number Generator vs. The Pragmatist's Nightmare

Description

A four-panel comic meme format depicting a conversation between developers. In the first panel, a smiling character enthusiastically suggests, 'we need a random number generator'. The second panel shows another smiling character, with a thought bubble or background image displaying a real photograph of a large wall filled with dozens of colorful, glowing lava lamps. This is a direct reference to Cloudflare's 'Wall of Entropy,' which uses the chaotic patterns of lava lamps to generate cryptographic-grade random data. A vertical line separates these two panels from the last two, which show two other characters with expressions of horror, confusion, and despair. This meme humorously illustrates the classic engineering conflict between creating a technically 'cool' and novel solution versus a practical and maintainable one. While using lava lamps for entropy is a clever, real-world application of generating true randomness, the characters on the right represent the pragmatic viewpoint of senior engineers and SREs who foresee the immense operational and maintenance nightmare of such a physically-dependent system, when a simple call to a standard cryptographic library would suffice

Categories

Cryptography Security DesignPatterns Architecture DeveloperExperience DX DevOps SRE

Common Tags

Entropy CryptographyAlgorithms Security Hardware

Comments

39
Anonymous ★ Top Pick It's all fun and games until you have to write the Terraform provider for 'cloudflare_lava_lamp_instance' and the acceptance tests have a 30-minute warm-up time
  1. Anonymous ★ Top Pick

    It's all fun and games until you have to write the Terraform provider for 'cloudflare_lava_lamp_instance' and the acceptance tests have a 30-minute warm-up time

  2. Anonymous

    "Sure, we could just call /dev/urandom - but legal said FIPS likes its entropy with a side of mood lighting."

  3. Anonymous

    Somewhere a principal engineer is screaming 'Just use /dev/urandom!' while the infrastructure team is already calculating the TCO of a quantum entropy harvesting cluster with redundant cosmic ray detectors for 'true randomness at scale.'

  4. Anonymous

    When your junior dev suggests using blockchain for generating random numbers, and you realize they've been reading too many whitepapers. Sure, you could use Math.random() or /dev/urandom, but why not burn enough electricity to power a small city and contribute to global GPU shortages? At least the entropy is... distributed. The real random number here is how many months until the electricity bill bankrupts the project

  5. Anonymous

    If your RNG seed fits in a Terraform variable, it’s not entropy; point a webcam at a wall of lava lamps, hash it into the kernel pool, and call it FIPS-compliant office decor

  6. Anonymous

    After the VM’s entropy pool starved and TLS handshakes stalled, we fixed it the enterprise way: a webcam pointed at 100 lava lamps - finally, a microservice with literally good vibes

  7. Anonymous

    The original CSPRNG: perfectly reproducible across runs - dog-ear page 314159 and watch it never drift

  8. @mrYakov 1y

    hash from last comment

  9. @CcxCZ 1y

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generator

    1. dev_meme 1y

      I'm actually sad by not seeing any mentions of RDRAND

      1. @polyduekes 1y

        rdrand can be shitty sometimes https://github.com/google/security-research/security/advisories/GHSA-4xq7-4mgh-gp6w

        1. dev_meme 1y

          Yep, but the same applies to almost any other device when you need A LOT of random numbers This is a whole reasoning behind lava lamps :D

          1. @polyduekes 1y

            i know, i just wanted to mention that

          2. @CcxCZ 1y

            Mainly that's the reasoning behind 1) mixing all the entropy sources and feeding it to CPRNG 2) actually measuring the entropy

            1. dev_meme 1y

              Regarding point 1 - input is crucial part, it’s not separate from any CRNG but key part of the design for any Depending on context and how CRNG is being used, "measuring the entropy" might differ so this one is also unclear

              1. dev_meme 1y

                Anyway

                1. @CcxCZ 1y

                  the RDRAND attack used 4: https://m.xkcd.com/221/ ;-)

                2. @Le_o_R 1y

                  I'm saddened by how much I had to scroll till I saw this classic Dilbert.

    2. @azizhakberdiev 11mo

      glorified uncalibrated clock

      1. @deadgnom32 11mo

        *cock

      2. @CcxCZ 11mo

        *uncalibratable If it could be calibrated it could be predicted.

  10. @einbetungzahl 1y

    Fluctuations in my shitty eastern European electricity network

  11. @RiedleroD 1y

    keysmash from your local queer person :3

    1. @purplesyringa 1y

      :3

  12. @hy60koshk 1y

    A glass to cum into. When in need of the next value, it is calculated based on the current cumlings' position.

    1. @purplesyringa 1y

      bruh

  13. @spacenuke 1y

    I hear Quantinuum thinks they can sell quantumly random numbers…. I guess when all your machine can do is make random numbers you have to make lemonade somehow

    1. dev_meme 1y

      When life gives you random numbers 🤷‍♂️

  14. @zaspirin 1y

    ask a lot of people what's the most random number 1-100, and pick most chosen. End up with 37, which must be really random if a lot of people agree 🌚

  15. @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 1y

    This is cloudflare

    1. @hoodiepaws 1y

      finally, i had to scroll thru a lot of comments to find someone else who recognised it

      1. dev_meme 1y

        It feels like people in the field burn out so fast that they do not remember events from 5 years ago Though I googled and it was in 2017. Maybe most of followers didn't even wrote their first line of the code 8 years ago?

      2. @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 1y

        Sad😭

      3. @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 1y

        But I am still not sure how "random" this is. I mean I see how overcomplicated it is and I understand hashes but still. "What if someone models all atoms and predicts their behavior?" /s

        1. dev_meme 1y

          You forgot camera's noise That little boy is a real banger

          1. @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 1y

            Yes I thought about it too

            1. @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 1y

              But then why use the lavalamps at all?

  16. @azizhakberdiev 1y

    Digits of Pi but backwards

  17. Deleted Account 1y

    you mean based on this photo it will go to the next value?

More like this

More like this in Cryptography →
Cryptography Entropy CryptographyAlgorithms
Trail of Bits Ships Tarot-Powered Claude Skill: let-fate-decide

Trail of Bits Ships Tarot-Powered Claude Skill: let-fate-decide

AI ML
Cloudflare's Lava Lamp Wall of Entropy Declares War on Production

Cloudflare's Lava Lamp Wall of Entropy Declares War on Production

Security
Silly Cat Name: SSH Public and Private Keys

Silly Cat Name: SSH Public and Private Keys

Security
Use J and K for navigation