Why is a rainbow table called a rainbow table

Googling, I find plenty of references to rainbow tables, but none seem to explain WHY it's called a rainbow table.

Where's the rainbow?

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Reply to
Alice J.
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I'm not sure this is correct, but it's all I could find:

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

That said this: "They're called rainbow tables because each column has a different reduction function and sortof looks like a rainbow."

I found, after lots of bad hits, a few similar hints here:

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"they call it Rainbow tables because they use a different reduction function on each column on the table"

And another hint here:

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"Rainbow tables differ in that they don't use multiple tables with different reduction functions, they only use one table. However in Rainbow Tables a different reduction function is used for each column."

Not concrete but I guess that's as good as it gets.

Reply to
Alice J.

Could be, that they mean, that the difference from one row to the next is only a little bit different like a rainbow. ;-)

Sincerely, Markus

Reply to
Markus Grob

: These files are called rainbow tables because they : contain every letter combination "under the rainbow".

The implication seems to be that Martin Hellman coined the term in a paper published in 1980.

Reply to
Alice J.

The term is from a paper by Philippe Oechslin in 2003.

Reply to
Richard Kettlewell

I forgot to put the cite where this supposedly came from

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Reply to
Alice J.

OK. This meaning seems to be possible. Beacuse of this, I use salted passwords.

Sincerely, Markus

Reply to
Markus Grob

?No preview available for this page?. But you don?t need to look at third-party sources, the relevant papers are linked from the Wikipedia page.

Reply to
Richard Kettlewell

Some said the term was coined in "Making a Faster Cryptanalytic Time-Memory Trade-Off" by Philippe Oechslin (2003) in which he describes an improvement to Hellman's method. He doesn't explain the term.

Reply to
Alice J.

Others explain this...

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(beginning with: Because it contains the entire "spectrum" of possibilities.)

Reply to
Alice J.

They don?t, though. That person is just guessing, wrongly.

The guess further down by osgx that that the different reduction functions are notionally different colors is much more plausible.

Reply to
Richard Kettlewell

Maybe, but usage of the term in English language printed books started in about 2002:

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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