This article is about RainbowCrack & How to use Rainbow Crack with Rainbow Tables, this includes how to generate rainbow tables, where to download them and what tools to use.
RainbowCrack & How To Use Rainbow Crack?
RainbowCrack is a general propose implementation of Philippe Oechslin’s faster time-memory trade-off technique.
In 1980 Martin Hellman described a cryptanalytic time-memory trade-off which reduces the time of cryptanalysis by using precalculated data stored in memory. This technique was improved by Rivest before 1982 with the introduction of distinguished points which drastically reduces the number of memory lookups during cryptanalysis. This improved technique has been studied extensively but no new optimisations have been published ever since.
You can find the official Rainbowcrack project here, where you can download the latest version of Rainbowcrack.
So what is RainbowCrack?
In short, the RainbowCrack tool is a hash cracker. A traditional brute force cracker tries all possible plaintexts one by one in cracking time. It is time-consuming to break complex password in this way. The idea of time-memory trade-off is to do all cracking time computation in advance and store the result in files so called “rainbow table”.
Basically, these types of password crackers are working with pre-calculated hashes of ALL passwords available within a certain character space, be that a-z or a-zA-z or a-zA-Z0-9 etc.
What are Rainbow Tables?
These files are called Rainbow Tables.
You are trading speed for memory and disk space, the Rainbow Tables can be VERY large, although Rainbow Table attacks are very effective.
Be warned though, Rainbow tables can be defeated by salted hashes, if the hashes are not salted however and you have the correct table, a complex password can be cracked in a few minutes rather than a few weeks or months with traditional brute forcing techniques.
So where do I download Rainbow Tables?
There are various locations you can download Rainbow Tablse, for example you can find a fairly comprehensive set of free Rainbow Tables at Project RainbowCrack including paid tables optimized for various things (LM, NTLM, MD5, SHA1 etc).
List of Rainbow Tables
You can generate them yourself with RainbowCrack, this will take a long time and a lot of disk space.
Project Shmoo is offering downloads of popular Rainbow Tables via BitTorrent.
http://rainbowtables.shmoo.com/
Where can I get a Rainbow Table Generator?
The tool to generate Rainbow Tables actually comes along with the RainbowCrack download, the tool is rtgen (for Windows rtgen.exe) .
What other software can I use for a Rainbow Table attack?
There is, of course, the original RainbowCrack as mentioned above.
Then there is:
Ophcrack Rainbow Table Password Cracker
Ophcrack is a Windows password cracker based on a time-memory trade-off using rainbow tables. This is a new variant of Hellman’s original trade-off, with better performance.
Cain and Abel (newly added support for Rainbow Tables)
Cain & Abel is a password recovery tool for Microsoft Operating Systems. It allows easy recovery of various kind of passwords by sniffing the network, cracking encrypted passwords using Dictionary, Brute-Force and Cryptanalysis attacks, recording VoIP conversations, decoding scrambled passwords, revealing password boxes, uncovering cached passwords and analyzing routing protocols.
Cain and Abel is personally my favourite fully featured password whacking tool, it also has a good packet sniffer, which grabs and decodes passwords and many methods for password cracking. The interface is decent too. I’ll write more on how to get the most out of Cain later.
LCP
Main purpose of LCP program is user account passwords auditing and recovery in Windows NT/2000/XP/2003
This is basically a free version of l0phtcrack which ended up turning into commercial software.
