This article is about RainbowCrack & How to use it, including generating rainbow tables and downloading them.
Rainbow Cracker
RainbowCrack implements Philippe Oechslin’s faster time-memory trade-off technique, first published in 1980.
In Martin Hellman’s initial paper from 1980 (recounting what he had learned at MIT), he presents a cryptanalytic time-memory trade-off that offers an improvement over standard methods by using precalculated data stored in memory. This technique was further refined by Rivest before 1982 when he introduced distinguished points which greatly reduce the number of memory lookups during cryptanalysis. But no other optimizations have been forthcoming since then—a hole RainbowCrack hopes to fill!
So what exactly is RainbowCrack?
In short, the RainbowCrack Tool is a hash-breaking tool. A traditional brute force cracker attempts every possible plaintext password one at a time – an arduous task with complex passwords. The concept of Time Memory Trade Off allows for all cracking work to be done in advance and stored as files—so-called rainbow tables. In essence, these types of password crackers use pre-calculated hashes of EVERY password available within a specific character set – be it a-z or A-Z or numbers such as 0-9 or some mixture thereof.
What is the definition of Rainbow Tables?
These files are called Rainbow Tables. They trade speed for memory and hard drive space because they’re really big! However, Rainbow Table Attacks are effective against complex passwords- so keep that in mind when using this technique.
Where can I find downloads for Rainbow Tables?
There are many places where you can find rainbow tables such as Project RainbowCrack which includes paid tables for various passwords such as LM, NTLM, MD5, or SHA1; or a simple Google search would turn up pages of results.
A list of Rainbow Tables
You can create them yourself with RainbowCrack, but it will take a long time and you’ll need a lot of space. Project Shmoo offers downloads of popular Rainbow Tables via BitTorrent for users who prefer it that way.
Where can I download a Rainbow Table Generator?
To generate Rainbow Tables, you need to use the return program from within a Windows installation of RainbowCrack.
