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Rainbow Tables
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 transforming them using a scrambling function – typically a cryptographic hash. One line of attack against this protection is to precompute the hashes of likely or possible passwords, and then store them in a dataset. However, such a dataset can become too big as the range of possible passwords grows. Rainbow tables address this problem by storing chains of possible passwords to save space. Undoing the chains takes significant computation time, but overall this tradeoff makes certain classes of attacks practical. Rainbow tables partition a function (the hash), whose domain is a set of values and whose codomain is a set of keys derived from those values, into chains such that each chain is an alternating sequence of values and keys, followed by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 try guesses for the password and to check them against an available cryptographic hash of the password. Another type of approach is password spraying, which is often automated and occurs slowly over time in order to remain undetected, using a list of common passwords. The purpose of password cracking might be to help a user recover a forgotten password (due to the fact that installing an entirely new password would involve System Administration privileges), to gain unauthorized access to a system, or to act as a preventive measure whereby system administrators check for easily crackable passwords. On a file-by-file basis, password cracking is utilized to gain access to digital evidence to which a judge has allowed access, when a particular fi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
