Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 6th Jun 2012 22:30 UTC
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Member since:
2008-08-09
What I am saying is that using rainbow tables today is not really necessary, since enumerating the hashes on the fly on GPU is so cheap that keeping the table is not an all that huge optimization. 2.8 billion hashes per second means that you run through 56 gigabytes worth of potential hashes per second, and that's on a single cheaply available 5970 GPU. Storage is not an issue since you will just hash, check for a match, and then immediately discard it if unsuccessful.
Rainbow tables would of course help in that there are so many users in the LinkedIn dump, but it is still fairly easily within reach for an enterprising hacker to brute-force through a ton of them one by one. On smaller systems the salt is basically irrelevant, the GPU will go through the possibilities so fast that it is not worth the trouble to look at a table. This also means that anyone looking at a password dump can select some especially interesting user accounts and spend more resources on those, brute-forcing them more deeply than was ever practical with a rainbow table (which were always, of course, only good for short or simple passwords).
The accounts in the LinkedIn dump should be considered compromised with or without salt. Adding salt costs nothing, but it hardly makes a practical difference in the attitude you can take towards the crack.
Edited 2012-06-07 11:56 UTC