Precomputation for Rainbow Tables has Never Been so Fast

Gildas Avoine (1) , Xavier Carpent (2) , Diane Leblanc-Albarel (1)

1 SPICY - Security & PrIvaCY
2 Department of Computer Science - K.U.Leuven

Cryptanalytic time-memory trade-offs (TMTOs) are techniques commonly used in computer security e.g., to crack passwords. However, TMTOs usually encounter in practice a bottleneck that is the time needed to perform the precomputation phase (preceding to the attack). We introduce in this paper a technique, called distributed filtration-computation, that significantly reduces the precomputation time without any negative impact the online phase. Experiments performed on large problems with a 128-core computer perfectly match the theoretical expectations. We construct a rainbow table for a space N=242 in approximately 8 h instead of 50 h for the usual way to generate a table. We also show that the efficiency of our technique is very close from the theoretical time lower bound.

Mots clés: Cryptography; Time-Memory Trade-Offs (TMTO); Rainbow table; Distributed precomputation

Domaines: Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]

Gildas Avoine, Xavier Carpent, Diane Leblanc-Albarel. Precomputation for Rainbow Tables has Never Been so Fast. Computer Security – ESORICS 2021, 12973, Springer International Publishing, pp.215-234, 2021, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, ⟨10.1007/978-3-030-88428-4_11⟩. ⟨hal-03601665⟩