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What is a rainbow table used for?
Rainbow tables are tables of reversed hashes used to crack password hashes. Computer systems requiring passwords typically store the passwords as a hash value of the user’s password. When a computer user enters a password, the system hashes the password and compares it to the stored hash.
How does rainbow table Help attacker?
A rainbow table is a database that is used to gain authentication by cracking the password hash. It is a precomputed dictionary of plaintext passwords and their corresponding hash values that can be used to find out what plaintext password produces a particular hash.
Why are rainbow table attacks superior to brute force?
Rainbow tables form hash chains of length k and only store the endpoints of each chain. This reduces storage from the brute force case of n to 2n ÷ k (where n is the number of passwords we can quickly break).
What is a rainbow table hack?
A Rainbow Table was a resource used for hacking the cryptographic hash functions in order to discover plaintext passwords by using a pre-computed authentication database. Rainbow table solutions use an algorithm to look up the information needed to crack password hashes quickly.
What is the trade off for using rainbow tables?
Rainbow Tables use a time-memory trade off technique and require less storage and more processing time than simple look up tables. -Two users with the same password will have different hash values.
Why is it called rainbow table?
The reason they’re called Rainbow Tables is because each column uses a different reduction function. If each reduction function was a different color, and you have starting plaintexts at the top and final hashes at the bottom, it would look like a rainbow (a very vertically long and thin one).
What can a rainbow table be used for?
A rainbow table is a database that is used to gain authentication by cracking the password hash. It is a precomputed dictionary of plaintext passwords and their corresponding hash values that can be used to find out what plaintext password produces a particular hash.
How to protect against rainbow table based attacks?
To protect against a Rainbow Table based attack the most effective method of combating it is to ensure that every hash within a system is salted.
How does a rainbow table cryptanalysis attack work?
A rainbow table works by doing a cryptanalysis very quickly and effectively. Unlike bruteforce attack, which works by calculating the hash function of every string present with them, calculating their hash value and then compare it with the one in the computer, at every step.
What are the strengths and weaknesses of rainbow tables?
The strengths of a hash table are that recovering a password is lightning fast (binary search) and the person building the hash table can choose what goes into it, such as the top 10,000 passwords. The weakness compared to Rainbow Tables is that hash tables must store every single hash-password pair.