Rainbow Table Defense Simulator

Learn how rainbow table attacks work and why proper password hashing with salting is essential for security

Security Education Tool

This simulator helps developers and security professionals understand why password salting and proper hashing algorithms are essential. Learn to build more secure authentication systems.

What is a Rainbow Table?

A rainbow table is a precomputed lookup table for cracking password hashes. It trades computational time for storage space by precomputing hash chains.

1

Hash Password

password -> 5f4dcc3b
2

Reduce Hash

5f4dcc3b -> pass123
3

Repeat Chain

... -> end value

Interactive Chain Generator

Space-Time Tradeoff

1.6 MBStorage Required
500.0KAvg. Hash Operations
4.6%Success Rate
100.0MPasswords Covered
Chain LengthStorage
Storage Lookup Time

Rainbow Table Lookup Simulation

See how a rainbow table attack works by looking up a hash.

Defense Against Rainbow Tables

Salting

Add a unique random value (salt) to each password before hashing. This makes precomputed tables useless.

hash(salt + password)Highly Effective

Key Stretching

Use slow hash functions like bcrypt, scrypt, or Argon2 that make both table generation and lookup expensive.

bcrypt(password, cost=12)Highly Effective

Strong Passwords

Longer, complex passwords exponentially increase the search space, making tables impractical.

20+ chars with symbolsModerately Effective

Pepper

Add a secret server-side value (pepper) in addition to salt. Even if database is leaked, hashes are useless.

hash(pepper + salt + password)Highly Effective

Key Takeaways

Rainbow tables trade storage space for computation time - larger tables mean faster lookups.

Salting defeats rainbow tables by making each hash unique, requiring a new table per salt.

Modern password hashing algorithms (bcrypt, Argon2) are designed to be resistant to these attacks.

Never use unsalted MD5 or SHA-1 for password storage - they are vulnerable to rainbow table attacks.

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