RainbowCrack is a computer program which generates

rainbow table A rainbow table is an efficient way to store data that has been computed in advance to facilitate cracking passwords. To protect stored passwords from compromise in case of a data breach, organizations avoid storing them directly, instead transfo ...

s to be used in

password cracking In cryptanalysis and computer security, password cracking is the process of recovering passwords from data that has been stored in or transmitted by a computer system in scrambled form. A common approach ( brute-force attack) is to repeatedly t ...

. RainbowCrack differs from "conventional"

brute force Brute Force or brute force may refer to: Techniques * Brute force method or proof by exhaustion, a method of mathematical proof * Brute-force attack, a cryptanalytic attack * Brute-force search, a computer problem-solving technique People * Brut ...

crackers in that it uses large pre-computed tables called

s to reduce the length of time needed to crack a password drastically. RainbowCrack was developed by Zhu Shuanglei, and implements an improved time–memory tradeoff cryptanalysis attack which originated in Philippe Oechslin's

Ophcrack Ophcrack is a free open-source ( GPL licensed) program that cracks Windows log-in passwords by using LM hashes through rainbow tables. The program includes the ability to import the hashes from a variety of formats, including dumping directly fr ...

. Some organizations have made RainbowCrack's rainbow tables available free over the internet.

References

External links

Project RainbowCrack
- Developer's official site.
Rainbow Tables & Rainbow Crack tutorial

Recovering Windows passwords with RainbowCrack
Password cracking software {{compu-prog-stub

See also

References

External links