USING THE RAINBOW METHOD TO EXPOSE MD5 HASH FUNCTIONS
Hybrid Rainbow is a new super-powerful method that combines a hybrid attack with the popular pre-computation technique. Combining the flexibility of a hybrid attack with the convenience and speed of tabular cryptanalysis, it can easily recover passwords that were previously considered “strong” or even “unrecoverable”. Now, for any hash function, having counted the hybrid table once using a quality dictionary or a combination of dictionaries, you can recover passwords from a large number of characters in seconds. Back in 2003, Philippe Oechslin announced a new method called Rainbow Attack (“Making a Faster Cryptanalytic Time-Memory Trade-Off”), which allowed brute-force password pre- computation. Having once generated a table for a certain set of characters and a certain password length (for example, 7 Latin characters) and saved it to disk, we can access the table as many times as we like, and search for passwords for the corresponding set of characters no longer by brute force, but by choosing the desired hash -values from the table, which reduces the attack time by orders of magnitude. The relevance of the topic under consideration is determined by the fact that currently most services and applications use the 128-bit MD5 hashing algorithm in their processes to ensure such facets of information security as integrity and confidentiality. Without the use of additional parameters that are used in calculating the hash function, the data obtained as a result of MD5 operation can be compromised, which can lead to the possibility of unauthorized access, substitution of a “signed” file, or leakage of restricted information.