Ethical Hacking Questions
A rainbow table is a precomputed table that contains a large number of possible plaintext passwords and their corresponding hash values. It is used in password cracking to speed up the process of finding the original password from its hash value. Instead of calculating the hash value for each possible password, which can be time-consuming, a rainbow table allows for quick lookup of the hash value and its corresponding password. This is achieved by reducing the search space and storing only a subset of possible passwords and their hashes. However, rainbow tables are limited to specific hash algorithms and may not be effective against salted passwords, where a unique random value is added to each password before hashing.