rainbowattack

Anyone know why it is called rainbow table? Just remembered we have learned there is an attack called "dictionary attack". Why it is not call dictionary? Because it contains the entire "spectrum" of possibilities. A dictionary attack is a bruteforce technique of just trying possibilities. Like this (python pseudo code) mypassworddict = dict() for password in mypassworddict: trypassword(password) However, a rainbow table works differently, because it's for inverting hashes. A high level overview of a hash is that it has a number of bins: bin1, bin2, bin3, bin4, bin5, ... Which correspond to

I was reading a few articles on salts and password hashes and a few people were mentioning rainbow attacks. What exactly is a rainbow attack and what are the best methods to prevent it? Vilx- The wikipedia article is a bit difficult to understand. In a nutshell, you can think of a Rainbow Table as a large dictionary with pre-calculated hashes and the passwords from which they were calculated. The difference between Rainbow Tables and other dictionaries is simply in the method how the entries are stored. The Rainbow table is optimized for hashes and passwords, and thus achieves great space