Creating Security Through Randomness

The report describes Cloudflare’s use of physical entropy sources—lava lamps, double pendulums, and mobiles—to seed cryptographic randomness by hashing images as input to CSPRNGs, providing defense in depth beyond OS RNGs. It surveys broader natural entropy methods and details the League of Entropy and drand, a decentralized, verifiable public randomness beacon with roughly 23 global nodes, 128-bit security, and timelock encryption. The service handles over 1.5 billion requests per month for applications like Filecoin, Web3 games, and NGO beneficiary selection, with plans to expand the consortium for greater trust and performance.