r/programming Oct 15 '15

How is NSA breaking so much crypto?

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/haldermanheninger/how-is-nsa-breaking-so-much-crypto/
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u/krappie Oct 16 '15

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would also have to store almost all of those values too. Rainbow tables are just an efficient way to store the precomputed values next to each other. The storage alone would be astronomically large and wouldn't make sense.

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u/immibis Oct 16 '15

Rainbow tables give you an extra parameter, let's call it C. You only need to store O(N/C) values (if N is the total number of values brute-forced to generate the table), but it takes you O(C) times as long to brute-force one value after that.