Rainbow Table Attack

A rainbow table attack is a sophisticated method used in cryptography and cybersecurity to crack password hashes. It's an efficient technique for decrypting hashed passwords, which are a common method for securely storing passwords.

Hash functions are used to store secure passwords by converting them into a fixed-size string of characters, which is a hash. Hashing is a one-way process, meaning it is intended to be infeasible to reverse the process.

Rainbow Tables are large, precomputed tables containing the hashes of many possible plaintext passwords. They map specific hashes back to their original plaintext passwords. An attack compares the hash from a password-protected system to the hashes in the table to find a match.

They are much more efficient than Brute Force Attack|brute force attacks because they allow attackers to look up the hash directly instead of computing it for every attempted password.