Smart Table Recovery (Rainbow Tables)

Smart Rainbow table is a precomputed lookup table, which can be used to recover the password from its hashed representation. The use of a rainbow table is much faster than a simple brute-force attack (essentially, most hard work for cracking the password has been already done when the rainbow table was created). This method is based on "Rainbow Tables", however we have improved this method a lot, signficiantly reducing the required amount of disk space (to one fourth) and improving the performance.

Smart Rainbow Table Recovery Method can be used in a number of situations. It is particularly good for recovering Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 passwords. It is also applicable for other tasks, such as recovering a password when its hash (MD5, MD4, SHA1 or any other) is known. Smart Table Recovery is based on special precomputed recovery tables. They allow for breaking of long and complex password quite quickly.

The following our products supports Smart Rainbow Tables:

WinPassword v6.0+ supports Smart Rainbow Table Recovery.
MD5 Password Pro v4.0+ software.
SHA1 Password Pro v4.0+ software.
Express Recovery Inhouse Edition
PDF

It is not necessary to use this method to recover short passwords (up to five characters) and long but simple passwords. The table below shows password recovery time estimates for Smart Rainbow Table Recovery and classic Brute Force Attack. Remember, passwords longer than 7 characters are split into two parts, so 7 characters it the worst case.

	Brute Force Attack	Smart Rainbow Table Recovery
Short passwords (up to 5 characters)	9 minutes	N/A
6 characters alphanumeric	13 minutes	5 minutes
6 characters all characters	10 hours	5 minutes
7 characters letters only	45 minutes	40 minutes
7 characters alphanumeric	8 hours	40 minutes
7 characters all characters	29 days	40 minutes

As you can see, Smart Rainbow Table Recovery is especially useful for recovering complex 7 character passwords containing punctuation marks and other non-alphanumeric characters.

Key facts about Smart Rainbow Table Recovery:

the recovery time required depends on the number of passwords you want to recover (near to linear dependence). The more passwords you have, the longer is the recovery process.
the recovery time depends on a number of factors, however you can roughly estimate it as: 40 + N/3 minutes, where N is the number of passwords you want to break.
the success rate is over 99% , however there is a small probability that Smart Rainbow Table Recovery fails.
recovery tables take a lot of disk space, about 40 Gb (for WinPassword v6.0, in WinPassword 7.0 we significantly improved the recovery algorithm, so new tables take 14 Gb only).
Smart Rainbow Tables are available for free for WinPassword Pro users. Please contact us for further information.

...more technical information on rainbow tables...

Smart Raibow Table Recovery Method

Key facts about Smart Rainbow Table Recovery: