RainbowCrack – Largest NTLM rainbow tables ever

November 28, 2010 – 9:04 AM

RainbowCrack is a general propose implementation of Philippe Oechslin’s faster time-memory trade-off technique. Function of this software is to crack hash.

The straightforward way to crack hash is brute force. In brute force approach, all candidate plaintexts and corresponding hashes are computed one by one. The computed hashes are compared with the target hash. If one of them matches, the plaintext is found. Otherwise the process continues until finish searching all candidate plaintexts.

In time-memory tradeoff approach, the task of hash computing is done in advance with the results stored in files called “rainbow table”. After that, hashes can be looked up from the rainbow tables whenever needed. The pre-computation process needs several times the effort of full key space brute force. But once the one time pre-computation is complete, the table lookup performance can be hundreds or thousands times faster than brute force.

This document explains the steps to make the RainbowCrack software working for first time user. Most contents in this document are implementation specific, while others are generic to time-memory tradeoff algorithm.

Source:
http://project-rainbowcrack.com