I'm dead sure they aren't using them for anything.
This is SF. If they were really used for anything, a random dude in a black hoodie and white SUV can just smash the glass and take down the internet, and the SF police wouldn't do a thing.
This is SF. If they were really used for anything, a random dude in a black hoodie and white SUV can just smash the glass and take down the internet, and the SF police wouldn't do a thing.
Seeding PRNGs with sufficiently unpredictable data was a real security concern for a while. New cloud instances have a small entropy pool space for attackers to enumerate due to lack of a real source of randomness. (See the Debian/OpenSSL issue for what can happen when your entropy pool is too small/predictable)
One fun fact about XOR is that anything XOR'd with a uniform random distribution results in a uniform random distribution, so there isn't any harm in mixing additional non-attacker-controlled entropy sources in as long as at least one of them is sufficiently unpredictable. The lava lamps provide a potentially hard-to-predict source of entropy for this, but if it's not available then it certainly doesn't "take down the internet". They'll still use packet arrival timing, interrupt timing, etc to seed their CSPRNGs.
snip snip ?
But even if it happened, this is one of many additive entropy mechanism, removing or controlling only one source would not be sufficient for any attack.
And yes, as the other comment points out it's only one source among multiple.
Remember, these are only seed values, a pseudorandom number generator will run indefinitely, but from what I understand, CF re-runs these periodically with different seed values, to stop people finding the pattern.