What is Rainbow table attack?

The Power of Rainbow Tables: How Hackers Crack Passwords with Ease & Precomputed Dictionaries of Potential Password Possibilities

A rainbow table attack is a specialized method used in the computer world to breach security systems by guessing the passwords held in a system's database. Named for its colorful design, it's a precomputed table for reversing cryptographic hash functions. It is commonly used in cybersecurity to crack password hashes.

Rainbow table attacks operate on the fundamental principle that passwords can potentially be stored by companies and systems in two ways. The first is through plain text, where simply entering a password enables instant access. this method ludicrously subjects the password to a high risk of theft. As such, most companies store password data in a processed format known as hashing.

A hash value is a unique alphanumeric string derived from a string of text. What makes hash functions safer is that they are designed to work only in the forward direction. In other words, a password can be converted into a hash value, but the process can't be reversed to obtain the password from the hash value.

Naturally, hackers quickly developed a brute force technique where they would generate hash values and compare them against the available hash values in a database until a match is found. Despite being effective, this proved time-consuming and computationally expensive. So, an alternative approach using rainbow tables was devised.

A rainbow table turns the guessing game into a searching game. Instead of calculating the hash of each iteration when trying to crack a password, hackers pre-compute the hashes of all possible passwords and store them in a rainbow table. Since searching a rainbow table for values uses less computational power than iterating through guesses, the rainbow table attack is faster where a large number of hash operations are concerned.

Rainbow susceptibility does not beset all password registrations. Those featuring a randomly generated component alongside every password, known as a "salt", make it considerably more difficult to crack. When a salt is used, the hashed representation of the password changes, making it nearly impossible for the pre-computed rainbow table to match the hash, thus, drastically reducing the efficacy of rainbow attacks.

Rainbow attacks can find productivity against less protected systems or in environments where password best practices have not been followed, making them a concern for cybersecurity.

Antiviruses and network protection software now incorporate strategies to deflect flame and forestall rainbow table attacks. These may include enabling complex passwords with stringent criteria to avoid common and weak passwords, cycling passwords frequently to revoke the rainbow table attack opportunity window, and adopting two-factor authentication to present another intensity of security.

Defenses against rainbow table attacks also counsel adopting the use of salt. By adding a random value to each password before applying the hash function, the potential of a rainbow table attack reducing to practically nil.

a rainbow table attack poses a significant threat to computer security and data privacy. Fortunately, security measures like the application of salt, robust password setting, and two-factor authentication are minimizing this risk. It's imperative to regard rainbow tables as a potent tool in a hacker's arsenal and get protective measures such as antiviruses and firewalls in place to mitigate them.

Rainbow table attack FAQs