It's a lookup table for well known passwords. For the example below the rainbow table holds the plain-text and MD5 hashed format of many passswords for quick queries.
The
rainbow table I am using is
Hashkiller.co.uk: which boasts of over 830 BILLION unique decrypted MD5 hashes since 2007.
Here are 3 common passwords and their corresponding hashes.
MD5 Hashes with plain-text passwords| Password | Hash |
|---|
| secret | 5ebe2294ecd0e0f08eab7690d2a6ee69 |
| secret! | dd945ab221b14e3be0d31fd4026f27eb |
| trustno1 | 5fcfd41e547a12215b173ff47fdd3739 |
When entering in the hashes it queries then against its rainbow table and shows that all 3 were quickly found.
Obviously this isn't secure enough yet, and this leads us into the need for salting.
