Why is a rainbow table called a rainbow table

I'm not sure this is correct, but it's all I could find:

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:

And another hint here:

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

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

: 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.

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

I forgot to put the cite where this supposedly came from

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

Sincerely, Markus

?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.

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.

Others explain this...

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

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.

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