RAINBOW TABLE

Rainbow tables were invented by Philippe Oechslin as an application of an earlier, simpler algorithm by Martin Hellman.

 A rainbow table is a hash function used in cryptography for storing important data such as passwords in a database. Sensitive data are hashed twice with the same or with different keys in order to avoid rainbow table attacks.

A rainbow table is a hash function used in cryptography for storing important data such as passwords in a database.

One kind of attack similar to brute-forcing is the use of rainbow tables. These allow hackers to attack the hashed password in reverse using a precomputed table. While brute-forcing enters a random password into the locked program to see if the hashes matches, the rainbow method does this offline. This method requires that the hash to be reserved is known. The rainbow table is list of hashes for each word in a dictionary. Instead of verifying a match after every input like the brute-force attack,the rainbow method scans to see if the hash in the table.

This attack became popular because memory became cheaper and had a shorter computing processing time compared to brute-force.

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